St. Louis Children’s Evolutionary App Strategy Drives Key Business Objectives

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

St. Louis Children’s Hospital was an early adopter of mobile apps. Kid Care, its first app, launched more than six years ago as a symptom checker for parents. “Back in January 2010 it was just cool to have an app,” says John Odom, Webmaster at St. Louis Children’s. “But as we thought about it over time and the world changed with how people use mobile devices, we decided there was a great opportunity for us to keep the core function of the app—the symptom checker content—but to start finding ways to insert our own organization into the app.”

John Odom, Webmaster at St. Louis Children’s Hospital

The app’s core content is based on Schmitt-Thompson Symptom Checker Content, which is “very strong, evidence-based clinical content,” says Sue Altman, Chief Operating Officer of Self Care Decisions, a content distributor and mobile app consultancy and developer. St. Louis Children’s call center is a longtime user of the symptom checker content for pediatric triage. When a consumer version launched in 2000, the hospital began licensing the content for its website as well. And then, as consumers shifted their attention to the Internet to research symptoms and mobile devices began to surge, the obvious next step was to build an app around the symptom checker. “It was a natural transition for us to take that content and apply it to an app, which we called Kid Care,” says Odom.

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