A friend of mine told me to come over and check out his new healthcare mobile app. “Look,” he said, “It plays Frogger.” (Those of you who were still at the zygote stage in the 1970’s may have to Google Frogger.)
“What else does it do?” I asked. “Does it provide real time updates for inventory of appointments? Does it have click-to-call functionality? Notify you when you have a refill about to expire, or that your lab results are in? Does it tell you if your doctor is running thirty minutes late and waive half of your copay for inconveniencing you?”
“No, it is just a healthcare mobile app,” he replied. “The last healthcare app I had only displayed a phone number for their call center. But dude, this has Frogger!”

I’ve seen many of your mobile healthcare apps, and the best advice I can provide you is that you should consider adding Frogger to your app. That way at least your users will have something they can do when they use it. You may want to think about adding a Frogger link to your homepage as well.

Healthcare IT is growing by leaps and bound with or without you. The race to employ it effectively is somewhat like the arms race—another 1970’s reference. Second place, in whatever market you serve, is first loser. Most of you probably know the business adage; lead, follow, or get out of the way. Who would have thought so many healthcare organizations would choose ‘get out of the way’ as their healthcare IT strategy?

I was going to write about the importance of adding the need for your technology to be cognitive, but I thought that would seem like I was rubbing salt in the wound I just created.

Today there are wearables for employees to interact real time with patients. Seventy percent of health runs less than 20 percent of its enterprise apps in the cloud. This handcuffs their ability to manage effectively with connected systems, devices, and APIs from other businesses and mobile workers.

I just read that Fitbit and Amazon’s Alexa are learning how to play together.

Then there is DeepMind from Google for clinicians. While I have not seen confirmation yet, I believe that there must be a way to deploy blockchain technology to tie together more effectively consumers and patients to their healthcare food chain.

The time has come for healthcare to go big, or go home. Or play Frogger.