Kathryn's Final Blog Post

My goal of this project was to look at how usable telemedicine apps were, particularly those with a video call feature to speak with/see a physician. I wanted to see if these apps lived up to being the "future of medicine" and how easy there were to use.

I downloaded all three of the apps I looked at to my phone (DoctorOnDemand, LiveHealth Online, and HealthTap). I was originally interested in this topic because of DoctorOnDemand, which I always heard about from watching the show The Doctors and Dr. Phil. This app, surprisingly, ended up being my least favorite because it didn't offer nearly as much as the other two I looked at. My findings of how usable each app were are summarized in the screen capture below of one of my Power Point slides. I looked at what I saw as the five of the most relevant usability characteristics: simplicity, flexibility, memory, undo and availability. I quantified this data by giving each characteristic a numerical rating then totaling each app's score in a matrix.

For the future, further analysis could be done with this matrix by giving each usability characteristic a weight then recalculating the app's score based on the weights. This project has shown me more about the advanced features of telemedicine apps. I was most impressed with HealthTap's artificial intelligence feature, which was like WebMD but way more accurate and less scary with the results. Telemedicine apps in the future may be able to replace websites like this because the diagnoses I've seen so far have been much more accurate and less extreme. Hopefully this project has shown others how fast and easy telemedicine apps make doctor's appointments, because it has made me clearly see how much of a time drain the traditional office visits can be. Overall, telemedicine apps I believe, will play an increasingly larger role in medicine's future because of their convenience.