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NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2012/05/23 - MedHelper, a personal healthcare management app, hits a major milestone on the Android market with 50,000 downloads. The success of the app is linked to active dialogue with users and ongoing, responsive development.
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Everyone likes positive feedback, but developers of MedHelper, a personal healthcare app, are even happier with questions, concerns and even complaints. Even as MedHelper hit the 50,000 download milestone on the Android app market this week, the developers were hoping for a few more complaints.
As a top-performing, free mobile healthcare app, MedHelper has enjoyed feedback and comments from many of the 50,000 people who have downloaded the app on the Google market. The development team, Earth Flare from Montreal, Quebec, channels that feedback into direction and guidance for the ongoing refinement and development of the MedHelper app.
The result is an app that routinely gets 5-star reviews from users. On the day the MedHelper app hit the milestone, the review posted from one user called the app “Perfect.”
“Our approach is to reach out for to the user for feedback – good or bad. We count on them to guide us to further develop functions and features of the app,” says Jim Freeman, VP Earth Flare.
“I wanted to email the woman who labeled the app ‘perfect’ and ask her a few questions,” said Freeman,“to see if there was anything that we could do to make it easier for her to use, or more helpful.”
A recent article by Deloitte predicts the app market to exceed two million apps by the end of 2012 with only 20 percent expected to exceed 1,000 downloads. The 50,000 download milestone is a major achievement, especially for a specialised resource. And even those most popular of apps have approval ratings of 3.9 stars on average. With an approval rating of 4.3, MedHelper is anything but average.
As a prescription/medication compliance app, MedHelper is designed to help individuals, caregivers, and caregiver teams outside of the hospital or institutional environment. “Once you leave your doctors office, clinic or hospital you’re pretty much on your own” says Earth Flare President, Terry Fitzpatrick. “MedHelper is designed for the person on the street who needs help in tracking prescriptions, medications, treatments, appointments and schedules. MedHelper stores data for accurate prescription inventory and reminders assure medications are taken on time. This easy-to-use program makes personal prescription compliance manageable in even the most complicated scenarios. The ongoing exportable log also allows information to be shared with a circle of trusted family, friends and caregivers.
The developers of MedHelper are so interested in what users have to say that Freeman and Fitzpatrick,, have taken to approaching healthcare and caregiving associations to solicit their opinions.
To date, their office visits and presentations have brought them into contact with associations representing potential users in the millions with a diverse array of diseases and conditions. They have also been reaching out to organisations and associations who support both professional and family caregivers.
“We are not the experts,” says Fitzpatrick. “There are people out there struggling with very real concerns. They tell us what they need and we try to accommodate them.”
Fitzpatrick points to robust features that have been added to the app’s one-time simple features at the suggestion of users. For instance the multiple profiles function was designed to accommodate caregivers with multiple individuals in their care.
“And now we are working on developing cloud functionality that will allow users to sync devices and information across multiple platforms – (Desktops - Smartphone – Tablet, both IOS and Android) and easily create caregiver teams within MedHelper. All this based on suggestions from our users.”
MedHelper is designed and developed by Earth Flare. The company is guided by the principle that better healthcare needs better tools, and that better tools are better designed in collaboration with the user. MedHelper is available on the Google Market and the iTunes app store.
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