In an era where Disney and Netflix can create digital apps that meet the very specific individual expectations of a user, healthcare consumers naturally expect a similar seamless and high-quality digital experience from a healthcare mobile app.
THE CHALLENGE
But engaging patients digitally remains a complex challenge for hospitals and health systems, in part because there are so many different components to what patients want and need. That’s especially true in children’s hospitals, where organizations are working to meet the needs – not just of their patients, but also their patients’ families.
Multiple regulations govern the ways in which hospitals may connect with patients. While digital tools can give patients and their families the clarity they seek and the tools to manage their health more effectively, it’s not easy to come up with a single, all-encompassing app that can meet all their needs.
Nicklaus Children’s Health System needed the ability to customize a mobile app to meet the unique needs of its patients – who have diverse physical, behavioral and developmental health needs – and their families.
“There are the standard mobile offerings that address about 70% of their needs, and then there are the features that must be available if this population is going to rely on a children’s hospital’s digital app,” said David Seo, senior vice president and chief digital and innovation officer at Nicklaus Children’s. “This includes the ability to personalize the experience to the user. Determining how to provide the right mix for our patients and their families wasn’t easy, but it was necessary.”
PROPOSAL
In surveying the market, Nicklaus Children’s found there were mobile platforms with apps that met many of a typical patient’s needs, like apps for self-scheduling, lab results and messaging. There were platforms with specialty add-ons, too, like apps for wellness and behavioral health. There’s an app for practically everything.
“Our primary concern was: How do we reduce the proliferation of apps to create a platform that is relevant to the population we serve – primarily, children and their parents?” Seo asked. “How do we eliminate fragmentation, which detracts from the patient and family experience?
“We wanted a mobile platform that could serve as a digital one-stop shop for children’s hospital patients and their families,” he continued. “Ideally, such an app also would fit within our clinical and operational workflows, integrating with the EHR, for timely data and response. More than anything, we wanted to create a unified digital experience, one where every consumer-facing digital service or app would be available through the same platform.”
Staff found there weren’t many mobile platforms that would allow them to solve for this full set of challenges.
“The platform we chose is flexible and configurable,” Seo said. “It allows us to leverage the platform’s existing functionality, such as wayfinding, but also incorporate apps from any other vendor according to the needs of our patients and families and our team. This kind of flexible platform concept is tough to find in the healthcare mobile technology space. We believed it could provide substantial value in both the near term and long term.”
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Nicklaus Children’s made the choice to go with vendor Gozio, both for its flexible-platform approach and its sophisticated wayfinding application, which not only helps patients navigate from their home to the facility but also assists them with in-building wayfinding.
“That’s important in instances where a hospital expands, adding another facility or completing a construction project, as ours did when we opened a new five-story surgical tower last year,” Seo explained. “Suddenly, the ability of patients and families to find their way from Point A to Point B can become quite complicated. That’s where a digital app like MyNicklaus can begin to provide the handholding experience that patients and families crave.
“Gozio also offered a lot of tools that gave us a strong base of functionality for our MyNicklaus app, such as the ability to schedule an appointment or find a physician directly in the app,” he added. “More important, though, their culture is a good fit with ours. They are very open to trying new things and supporting us in our ability to test apps from other developers and integrate them into our offerings.”
Moreover, not only has the vendor continued to expand its own set of tools, it also has launched a program that enables the Nicklaus Children’s IT team to build their own tools for the mobile platform and incorporate them into their digital ecosystem.
“The ability to work directly with a Gozio engineer in building unique applications and integrating them seamlessly with our digital technologies – including highly regulated and complicated systems like our patient portal – is what sets them apart from other mobile platform developers in healthcare,” Seo said.
“Today, we’re working with the vendor to add our own AI-driven chatbot to the MyNicklaus app,” he continued. “The chatbot already is live on our intranet. What other mobile platform developer is going to allow you to do that? Not many. The level of flexibility they’ve brought to this work is amazing. As we work to add the AI chatbot to MyNicklaus, their engineers have been super helpful in ensuring the chatbot exists as part of the overall mobile platform, not an isolated component.”
RESULTS
Over the past two years, daily use of the mobile patient platform increased substantially to reflect Nicklaus Children’s goals of growing patient engagement and platform adoption. Unique users per day increased from 130 in 2023 to 400 in 2024 and reached about 750 in 2025 – a fivefold increase over the past two years.
“For context, Nicklaus Children’s sees about 1,500 encounters across inpatient, outpatient and emergency department settings, which suggests that nearly half of all patients and caregivers are engaged with the platform each day,” Seo reported. “The number of platform sessions grew from 240 in 2023, to 850 in 2024, and in 2025, our users access our mobile patient platform more than 2,000 times daily.
“This nearly tenfold increase in session growth indicates our platform provides the intended benefits for our patient and families in terms of communication, navigation, clinical information and access,” he continued. “The use of platform core features that include navigation and Nicklaus Children’s webpages has increased by 170% since 2023.”
The most used feature of the mobile platform is the patient portal that has shown an eightfold increase in utilization over the past two years. These trends show the mobile patient platform continues to meet the strategic goal in maturing from a supplemental application into a central part of how patients and families interact with the health system, he added.
“We’re also continually looking for ways to address social determinants of health through the mobile app,” he noted. “Up to 70% of our patients are on Medicaid. Some face challenges with food insecurity. Some struggle to access reliable transportation.
“We work to connect patients with community services that can help meet these needs within a single digital hub,” he said. “That type of cohesive digital support is vital to ensuring patients’ whole-health needs are met in ways that feel both comfortable and empowering.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
A healthcare mobile app is no longer a nice-to-have tool for patient engagement; it’s a must-have technology, Seo advised.
“Knowing this, healthcare providers now must consider the level of flexibility a mobile platform offers in adding new capabilities over time,” he said. “It’s also important to assess how well the platform’s features interact with the hospital’s existing technologies. Make sure, too, to evaluate the app’s performance from the standpoint of whether the app empowers the organization to meet its strategic goals.
“Finally, take a careful look at the culture of the mobile platform or digital app vendor before initiating work,” he concluded. “At Nicklaus Children’s, much of our mobile app success comes down to the relationship between our team and the vendor’s team. The right chemistry fuels digital innovation.”
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Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
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