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Revisiting the "best of" ideas throughout the summer for social media marketing efficacy.

8/25/2014

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I think that the number one issue still facing our app is....

The app itself.

Although we can make the app look good in marketing aspects, I feel that our app needs a way to "hook" users.  Some aspect of our app must provide more convenience, more value, and find a way to be either number one or number two in our field. 

Right now our health promise application vs. other apps is not really bringing anything to the table that other apps are not doing right now.

One thing that I think that our app can and should do is provide a way for users AND health professionals to easily import, export, input, and update their data from other devices. 

We should also find a way for our application to meld itself into other applications, preferrably those with larger installed user bases.

By creating strategic partners we can have more stakeholders working with us to create success.  However we must be uncompromising in creating a high value product on our own that provides unique value that others cannot duplicate.

I believe that we should rather than try to be everything for everyone that we should focus on a niche and do that spectacularly.  Perhaps we can create a code to automatically interpret data and then put it into the apple healthkit database in a manner which will be intuitive, and precise. 

In one of our meeting it was mentioned that body parts are given a code.

Our strategic partners can be given this code in return for a complete comprehensive product which is greater then the sum of its parts.

Recreating in a different format code that already exists seems redundant, and if we are not doing it better then the rest of the market, then it is unlikely that our product can succeed, even with the best of marketing.

However it is not just a case of if you build it they will come.

Some ideas I had to market product is that as mentioned near the beginning of my internship we could engage in strategic alliances with insurance companies to offer discounts on premiums for people that are regularly updating their app with quality information.  Some research showing a correlation between patients that are actively involved with tracking their own health progress and lower overall health costs can provide a way for us to justify a certain amount of fund requisitioning from these groups.

Aetna Carepass is already invested in this field and looks like a decent strategic partner right off the bat, however the development of our own in-house apps which serve to perhaps even compete with their existing offerings could be problematic.  Perhaps we can work with this organization more intimitely to find out what aspects of their own applications they need help with. 

As for moves we could make to start marketing products, one thing we could do is to have a subscriber contest on our facebook page... for example what we could do is to say that people that subscribe a friend get a free entry to win an iphone 6.  However this move is not good unless we have a top tier product.



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Creating a trusted online presence, and more app dissection

8/13/2014

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Trust takes time.  ESPECIALLY if you are promoting a commercial product!  We must be sure to create value everytime we interact with our clients.

Online the key to building trust within smaller niche communities is by providing high quality content.  

Since I'm coming to the POSSIBLE end of my internship on this project, I'm starting to look at how to keep this part of the project going after I leave.

If someone does not continue to produce quality content amongst the crohn's online community, then we will have to rely merely on brand recognition and reviews in the google store.  Name brand recoand our efforts will have been in large wasted.

It would be great to find if someone near to this project is either blogging or some kind of information gathered from patients is easily able to be published.  Perhaps we can even use intern blogs and promotion thereof to continue to generate content which will be found by web crawlers.  

If we do this we should make sure that all of our content meets certain minimal criteria for quality, our content should be clearly branded making it clear what our products are and what function they serve and ideally we should maintain some level of Search Engine Optimization (set metatags, intelligent titles, and so forth.)

I also believe that for as long as we can do it we should make an effort to allow users to interact in some way with each other and with us.

This type of thing should  get customers invested and help build brand loyalty.

An update on the forums


CCFA actually makes GI Buddy.  And?  No responses to the original post.  Furthermore, checking the forums it seems that there is a 4 day gap between a post placed yesterday and the previous post.  It seems that this forum does not have a good amount of traffic and contributors.


Crohn's forums which looks to be the best forum actually deleted my post due to the seemingly commercial nature of my post.  After an email exchange with one of the admins verifying the authenticity of our organization my post was retitled and reposted at this link.  My account was also changed to be given special permissions to post question of this nature which requires admin approval.  We received some feedback which I used to compile my following report.

The Healing Well forum is actually looking for a Crohn's disease moderator, and this could be a special opportunity for our lab to gain instant credibility with this subset of the population.  The link to the admin request is here.    
We received some feedback which I used to compile my following report.

Testing existing apps

GI Buddy - reviews on this app are not good... Many people complain that this app doesn't work correctly and is in actuality non functional.  For me however the app worked fine.  I do however agree that it is annoying to have to log in each time.  Also I found that the food diary had some odd entries.  For example when looking up chicken breast, there was an option to select raw chicken tenders.  (Seriously... Who's eating raw chicken tenders?)  NOTE:  This morning I tried to load GI Buddy, but it got frozen on my screen.  I did a hardware reset removing the battery and replacing it back in and the app once again would not load.  FAIL!

GI Monitor- reviews on this app are much better, also I like that they have made an introductory video for their product.  It seems better supported and better developed then GI Buddy.  This product was sold to Medivo, so it's interesting that a developer saw fit to purchase an existing app rather then actually develop their own from scratch.  This reiterates my former statement that we may be able to garner value from purchasing or building strategic partnerships with other app developers to provide a high quality product to our patients/ customers.

I will continue to update with more apps as more apps are recommended.  Some apps are recommended which are not dedicated health apps such as daily diaries which some people are using to track their symptoms.  However as this is not part of an apple healthkit like ecosystem, I didn't really mess around that much with those apps.  However I did look at some of the feature sets and used this information to provide recommendations for our app.

APPS that I looked into that weren't GI related, but health related.

For diet trackers, my two favorite diet trackers are Sparkpeople and Myfitnessbuddy.  
One odd thing though is that these apps give me different calorie totals although I've logged in the same foods.  I guess that there's a certain amount of variance, but it is a little confusing.  
For fitness trackers my favorite app was JEFIT.  

My FAVORITE functionality which I found on JEFIT was the ability to sync my data with their website.  This way notes or exercise routines that I would want to develop but which would be awkward to input via a mobile device could be addressed through using my regular computer keyboard.

Also at each point where I enter data I am given the option of tracking my progress.

Also both Sparkpeople, Myfitnessbuddy, and JEFIT all save inputs and then actively use this to make data entry easier and faster.  For example JEFIT will remember how many reps, sets, and how much weight I did for my last workout and will auto fill with an input swipe system to move the numbers up or down.  So if last week I did 10 reps, and this week I did 12 reps all I have to do is swipe up a little and hit save and my numbers are in the system!  The food trackers save , "Favorite foods." which makes entering food items less repetitive.  For our app we should look to do something similar.

I also looked at 
Fitness Buddy Free  which is a program that just shows pictures of a variety of different exercises.  The  functionality of this program does not seem to bring any value that I could not get off of youtube, so I'm not a big fan of this app.
Sports Tracker is very cool for people that run.  It uses GPS and location tracking to measure how far you've run, and then allows you to share you route time and distance with your friends.  However I don't really run on the street really that much at all, so this app really isn't relevant for me.
Strong Log is a very bare bones app that just allows you to record your "Power lifts" or the 3 major compound exercise movements used in power lifting which are squat, deadift, and bench press.  It's just not enough content to keep my interest however.  and  
Gymwolf which is a fitness app like JEFIT, but just a little less better done.  
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Creating an online identity for our team in the social media space.

8/5/2014

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http://www.ccfacommunity.org/crohns-colitis-forum
http://www.crohnsforum.com/
http://www.healingwell.com/community/?f=17

For each of the above forum websites I created a user named:
Health Promise
The password for this account will be shared with the team.

I created a post on the board with the title and message as follows:

Subject:
Does anyone use any of the iphone or android apps to help keep track of their diet, exercise, and symptoms and treatment?

Message:
Does anyone use any of the iphone or android apps to help keep track of their diet, exercise, and symptoms and treatment?

If you have can you tell me why you liked them or didn't like them?

Also if you could let me know the name of the app and for which platform they developed the app for I would appreciate it!

Thank you!

Here are the links to the posts:

http://www.ccfacommunity.org/Post.aspx?Forum=11&Thread=11207
http://www.crohnsforum.com/showthread.php?p=803695#post803695
http://www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=17&m=3149279

crohns forums seems to show the most active users.

Some more quality posts should probably go up creating recognizable content.

More to come.

ADDED Note 8/6/2014

We've generated responses!




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Examining a similar already live App and seeking that cutting edge for food diaries.  Also a review of Carepass by Aetna.

8/4/2014

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So I looked at the app GI Buddy and decided to give them a little further examination.

The most obvious place to start looking for feedback is the review section on the apple website where customers have rated this app.  The link is provided here.

But not that much information is available, so I went to check out GI Buddy's comments located on their google play app page.

It seems like there are a few general overall high star ratings (probably from friends, or fans) and then there are a great deal of specific criticisms where users specifically mention that many parts of the app do not function correctly.
The app developer may have rushed this product to market

This should serve as a cautionary tale, and we should be sure that when we release our app that we are always providing our customers with a high level of value, and that every interaction with our app is functional and will garner immediate value.  Creating a poor app will damage our brand, and engender less trust from potential partners.  

A recurring theme that comes up amongst complaints with gastro related apps is that users often encounter difficulties working with  food diary applications.  (I don't think that our app even has a food diary tracker)  Primarily issues complained about seem to come mainly from the cause that  apps do not have specific food choices available or in useable masurements that the consumers can easily use.
It seems like too much work to do this part of the app well.  I think it's probably better to just license or join in on a strategic partnership with an already existing app.
Here is a list of the top 5 best food and nutrition tracking tools according to lifehacker.com


It seems that MYFitnessPal has a strong presence in the market as well as one of the largest food databases.  Also they have a large installed userbase, so if we can offer a highly technical installed user base  a chance to user our app, well this seems like it could work well.

Aetna Carepass or Apple Healthkit?

Well from an enterprise solutions it looks like the school's servers are not Apple based, so we are unlikely to see any benefit from using Apple generated data  in an Apple native environment.

Aetna's Carepass you can tell that the management is real serious about getting the app out and getting it right... BUT

Yikes!  The reviews about aetna's carepass are not good!

I will just copy over some words that jump out.

One user wants there to be a better privacy feature setting.  It' easy to add a screen lock feature where patients can decide to lock out the phone after a certain time, or close down the app after a certain amount of inactivity.
There was a complaint about how the app doesn't scale down well for mobile app usage, and there were several complaints about the clunkiness of the interface and how the app required multiple logins.

This complaint was prophetic for when I tried to present the app during my meeting with the rest of the team this turned out to be an issue.  

Also the reason for  using an interface to deal with the stand alone apps is apparent from me after doing research on this topic, but the benefit for the hassle is never made to the user, and no real value for using the app is made to the user.  I'd be shocked if really anybody was using this app with regularity at all.

The product is less then the sum of the parts!
Aetna Carepass needs some real work!

My latest assignment

is to create an identity amongst crohn's disease community blogs and so forth so as to build trust and communication with the IROQ brand.

http://www.ccfacommunity.org/crohns-colitis-forum
http://www.crohnsforum.com/
http://www.healingwell.com/community/?f=17
these are some forums that I will be attending to this weekl.


As for the "face" of our current app, I was thinking perhaps the app could wiggle it's smile or wink occassionally to just further let the user see the "face" in the app.  The first thing he eye sees is motion, so adding a component of some motion could make the app more attractive.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rahuls/pub/cvpr2010-food-rahuls.pdf



Additional apps for reading

But we can't judge just based off of these reviews for anumber of reasons.
Apple would be a direct competitorin this space, so to trust reviews on their site just isn't the best idea.  Also as this is a relatively new field and space what are the alternatives?  While the criticisms may be informative, even justified 
http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/page-1/TEC-293967/Seeking-Patient-Engagement-Payer-Curates-Mobile-Apps
http://mobihealthnews.com/15324/why-aetna-acquired-itriage-app-maker-healthagen/#comments
http://mobihealthnews.com/25909/mobile-health-ceos-look-back-on-acquisitions-forward-to-new-features/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aetna
http://www.emrandehrnews.com/tag/www-carepass-com/

https://developer.carepass.com/blog
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    Author

    Ed Lee is an aspiring medical student and a man driven by his passion to care for and advocate for others. 

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