UAMS Health App Launches, Provides New Connections
| UAMS patients, their families and guests can now experience the digital equivalent of walking up to an on-campus information desk and asking for help when they use the new UAMS Health smart phone app.
Launched earlier this month and now available for download on Apple and Android phones, the UAMS Department of Information Technology developed the app. It uses content from the university’s websites to allow users to identify the types of care UAMS Health offers, find the locations where they can access it, obtain information about UAMS physicians and other providers, and make appointments.
Guests and visitors also can look up menus for on-campus dining and hours of operation as well as discover other services.
Troy Walls, Director of Systems Development in the University’s IT department, said much of the credit for the app goes to Jasper Reddin, who joined UAMS in June as a Business Systems Developer.
Work had been done earlier to develop the app but much of that had to be scrapped when Apple changed its requirements, Walls said.
“When we began this process, we had no native development experience in the iOS or Android platforms,” Walls said. “Jasper and Matt Strauss, another Business Systems Developer, worked together to bring this app to market and to production. That gives us the opportunity to have a mobile app available, which the chancellor has wanted. I’m very pleased with it the current app and look forward to future improvements and enhancements that benefit our patients and customers.”
Once the IT team developed a working version of the app, they started beta testing in November with employee volunteers.
Reddin said the beta testing allowed them to see how the app performed on a variety of smart phones, especially different generations of devices. Through beta testing, the development team identified and corrected small glitches in the app’s performance.
For example, the app follows a system-wide accessibility rule where text size should increase for visually impaired readers. A beta tester pointed out that the increased font size caused layout issues in certain areas of the app and on certain screen sizes. In response, the team adjusted the layout depending on the system font size.
“I thought it would take a lot longer to get on board with what we were trying to do,” Reddin said. “I think it went beyond my expectations.”
The development process isn’t done though. The team expects to have more work to do as customer acceptance and usage of the app expands and attracts more users.
“We aren’t finished with it,” UAMS Chancellor Cam Patterson, M.D., MBA, said recently. “I think you’ll be just as excited as I am about watching this app evolve over time as we add features and functions to it. This will be a great way for our patients, patient families and guests to communicate with us and for us to communicate with them.”