CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY
Consumer experience drives patient app development
CASE STUDY
CASE STUDY
Consumer experience drives patient app development
Tidelands Health, a not-for-profit health system serving coastal South Carolina, stands out for its unique approach to community health. With four hospitals, more than 70 outpatient locations, and 2,500 employee, physician, and volunteer partners, Tidelands Health is transforming the region’s health by promoting wellness, preventing illness and supporting recovery—a commitment the organization has upheld for 75 years. The health system is dedicated to its mission of helping people live better lives through better health.
Tidelands Health, which serves the fastest-growing area in the country, understands that every relationship starts before a patient enters the health system’s doors. The organization focuses on the impact it can make by interacting with its community. Tidelands Health has homed in on elevating the importance of access and a digital front door being available and visible to consumers before a need arises.
Tidelands Health is aligned with MUSC Health, the academic medical center for South Carolina, allowing the health system to bring a broader complement of services to the region so that patients can receive care close to home.
Opportunity
Opportunity
Some of the challenges in a high-growth market are access, workforce, and recruitment. Another challenge is having the systems and capability to handle scaling growth. To help address ease of access, Tidelands Health developed a custom app that supports consumer needs beyond a typical patient portal.
Using NRC Health’s Community Insights, Tidelands Health was able to survey a panel of thousands of their own patients and consumers, allowing leaders to dig deeper into what functionality patients would want in a healthcare app.
Knowing most health-related apps fail, the Tidelands Health team set out to develop an app that delivered real value. The health system expertly timed the release of the custom My Tidelands Health app, waiting until essential functionality was available for consumers. Leaders didn’t want to create something without online scheduling or bill pay, so they launched the My Tidelands Health app simultaneously with an Epic go-live, allowing the inclusion of MyChart functionality in the My Tidelands Health app.
Ultimately, this timing led to the My Tidelands Health app establishing a digital front door for easy access. In turn the app has seen 30,000+ download since release.
Including consumer voices from the start
Including consumer voices from the start
Amy Stevens, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Tidelands Health, says the inclusion of helpful features in the app began with surveying consumers through their NRC Health’s Community Insights panel.
In July of 2023, NRC Health conducted an online survey of Tidelands Health’s patients who opted-in to the systems patient community. To get a baseline understanding, Tidelands Health first asked about smartphone use.
From there, Tidelands Health asked a series of multiple choice and open-ended questions.
“We asked our consumers what they’d like to see in an app,” Stevens says. “The patient portal functionality scored highly—the things you’d expect, like scheduling appointments or paying bills online. But other things were really important to our consumers, and they told us wayfinding is a big deal in our market. Wayfinding matters when you have a large population influx.”
Additionally, the organization’s entire marketing program is built on content strategy, using a digital content hub to share hundreds of pieces of health content a year—whether written articles, videos, or podcasts.
“Our consumers told us they wanted to be able to access that content through this app,” Stevens says. “Getting that feedback really helped us drive what we knew our app needed to be.”
And it worked. After the app launched in early March 2024, leaders saw 30,000 downloads, outpacing similar services at health systems five times larger than Tidelands Health.
“It’s been very, very successful, and I think it’s been successful because we listened to our consumers and acted on what they told us rather than assuming that we knew,” Stevens says.
“It’s been very, very successful, and I think it’s been successful because we listened to our consumers and acted on what they told us rather than assuming that we knew.”
—Amy Stevens, Vice President of Marketing and Communications
Putting community health partnership into action
Putting community health partnership into action
Co-designing the app with consumers and strategically launching it with Tidelands Health’s Epic go-live to include MyChart was no small undertaking.
“I won’t say it was an easy conversation, because there was a default position of, ‘If we have MyChart, why do we need this?’ or ‘MyChart’s got an app. Why do we need to create our own?’” she adds. “With good, actionable data and demonstrating the need, it became easy for the organization to recognize that our consumers were telling us what was important. We are seeing tremendous results from that investment.”
Tidelands Health leaders say that ongoing measurement and feedback around how people use the app is a living, breathing thing. They plan to continue evolving to meet those needs and help ensure they’re growing to be what their community wants them to be.
“With many users in a new market, they are searching for providers,” Stevens says. “We know that in this market, even more than in others, that provider directory is incredibly valuable. And so, we wanted full integration of the provider videos, ratings, and reviews populated within our NRC Health data. Being able to bring all of that into the app is just another way to empower consumers to make a choice.”
Community Insights to make better business decisions
Community Insights to make better business decisions
“NRC Health allowed us to move from anecdotal to actionable data,” Stevens says. “The integration of functionality is really important for us, in that we have a single partner with whom we are running our patient-satisfaction survey, provider ratings and reviews, and Community Insights panel. From an administrative and leadership standpoint, I get a much more holistic look, because they integrate with and touch each other. So that’s been incredibly valuable for us.”
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©NRC Health. Select images featured in this case study have been provided by Tidelands Health and are used with their permission.