Patient and family applications
Wayfinding, appointments, results and messaging in the patient's hand — because in a hospital of many buildings, the people with the least information are usually the visitors.
What a patient app has to do well
Wayfinding across large sites
Directions to the specific department, entrance and floor — including which door is open at which hour, which is the part signage rarely covers.
Appointments and preparation
What is booked, what to bring, what to stop taking beforehand, and what happens on the day, in language a worried family can follow.
Results and status updates
Results and progress released according to clinical policy, with the timing and the wording decided by clinicians rather than by the app.
Messaging with the care team
Structured, asynchronous contact with clear expectations about response times, which is safer than an inbox and kinder than a phone queue.
Accessibility and plain language
Designed for people who are anxious, unwell or accompanying someone who is — which rules out dense interfaces and clinical vocabulary.
Multi-language support
Including the languages actually spoken in the catchment, not only the national one.
Don’t see your challenge here? Talk to us about your project
A hospital gets more relief from an app for families than from another dashboard
Large sites generate a constant volume of questions that staff are not the right people to answer: where to go, when it will be, what to bring, whether it has started. Each one interrupts clinical work.
Answering those in the patient's hand is low-risk, high-volume relief. It also builds the trust needed before more sensitive functions — results, messaging, consent — are worth adding.
- Start with wayfinding
- Highest volume, lowest clinical risk.
- Family-aware
- Carers and parents are first-class users.
- Policy-driven release
- Clinicians decide what is shown and when.
- Plain language
- Written for anxious readers, not for records.
- Offline tolerant
- Usable where hospital signal is poor.
- Accessible
- Designed for people who are unwell or worried.
A mobile app for a large paediatric hospital and the families using it
The Kids mobile app was built for a paediatric setting, where the primary user is a parent navigating an unfamiliar and stressful environment. The functionality that mattered most was not clinical — it was knowing where to go, what would happen and when, which is exactly the information a large site is worst at communicating.
Common questions
Do you show clinical results in the app?
Only where the clinical team decides that is appropriate, and with their rules about timing and wording. The app is a delivery channel; the release policy belongs to the clinicians and is configurable rather than fixed by us.
How do you handle a parent acting for a child?
Through an explicit proxy model — who may act for whom, on what basis, and until when. It is modelled from the start because retrofitting delegated access into a patient app is considerably harder than designing it in.
Native app or web?
Wayfinding, notifications and poor-signal use generally argue for native; if the app is opened twice a year a responsive site may serve better. We give a recommendation based on your actual usage pattern and the support cost of each.
Let's talk about your healthcare platform
Tell us where the friction sits in the pathway today and what the regulatory position requires. We will come back with an honest read on the integration work, the identity problem underneath it, and what a realistic first phase looks like.
