Mend’s eHealth platform ensures secure and high-quality patient/provider contact with SessionStack

Background

Mend delivers a highly innovative, HIPAA-compliant healthcare communication platform that empowers patients and providers alike to connect via mobile devices and computers in a secure, reliable and confidential manner. Mend helps medical practices to digitally transform their business to take advantage of:

• Telemedicine via secure, peer-to-peer video communication
• Electronic forms including patient intake forms, scored assessments, and documents that require electronic signatures
• Secure messaging, including file exchange

Mend’s patient to medical practice messaging platform

Mend has been using SessionStack for its eHealth platform for more than 10 months.

Challenge

Operating in a highly-regulated and standards-driven industry, Mend needs to ensure their patient engagement platform is fully compliant with federal, state, and local laws within the United States as well as in other countries in which Mend operates.

Mend’s eHealth communication platform is used by various medical practices and patients alike, and therefore needs to provide quick resolution of issues caused by obsolete operating systems, deprecated browser versions, and poor internet connections.

Mend’s eHealth platform captures patient’s license and insurance details

To that end, a significant challenge for the team was finding, replicating and fixing bugs and usability issues that customers experienced. The complexity and scope of the browser/OS/network/device matrix made diagnosing and solving such problems a daunting task for a team with limited resources.

“We needed a way to see exactly what a user did to run into a problem”, said Dr. Craig Finch, Chief Information and Compliance Officer at Mend. “Things get even more complicated as we also have to comply with HIPAA, which requires that we either store all customer data in our own systems, or sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with a service provider, to ensure that they are contractually obligated to meet the same standards for the privacy and security of health care data as we do.”

Solution

At first, the team considered building an in-house solution, but quickly realized it would be a substantial effort that would distract the already limited resources from focusing on the core business. It was difficult to secure external help too, as the majority of solutions did not offer on premise options, and therefore were not HIPAA-compliant.

Mend decided to give SessionStack a try, as the latter provided the ability to host data on servers controlled and operated by Mend.

“The original reason to try SessionStack was the ability to deploy it locally and store user data in our own cloud. During the evaluation process we were really impressed with the SessionStack team’s professionalism and ability to deliver the product, which confirmed our decision to continue working with them down the road”, said Craig Finch. “Their excellent responsiveness and willingness to help adapt the product to our technical requirements reassured us that SessionStack is a partner we can trust.”

Results

Since implementing SessionStack, the Mend team has been using the user session recording solution on a daily basis. Their customer support team relies on live and recorded sessions to diagnose, document and quickly address issues that their customers experience.

“SessionStack helps us determine exactly what a user was doing when they encountered a problem, so that we can reproduce the issue and fix it”, said a member of the Mend support team. “These issues could be bugs in our web application, or elements of the user interface that people tend to find confusing. Watching a live session is now a critical part of our user support process.”

A session replay in SessionStack enables Mend’s support team to resolve customer issues real-time: while watching the video, the team gets everything that happened in the user browser in the timeline to the left.

10 months later, the Mend team continues to accrue positive results from leveraging SessionStack on a daily basis:

• Offering impeccable customer service and problem-free experience to customers, while ensuring their personal data is protected, is an important aspect of success in the eHealth industry. The ability to watch sessions helps the team document and report issues more efficiently, speeding up support turnaround times and increasing customer satisfaction levels.
• Freeing up resources to focus on core feature development. Rather than allocating a substantial part of the development team to finding, replicating and resolving issues, with SessionStack continuously running in the background, the team can focus its efforts on more strategically important development tasks.

The way Mend leverages SessionStack to ensure an outstanding customer experience has evolved too. The team’s original idea to use SessionStack as a diagnostic tool to analyze historical problems has progressed to a hands-on, real-time approach to customer difficulties: Mend’s support team now watch user sessions live while discussing the issue with the customer who’s experiencing it. SessionStack’s live-session capability alleviates customer pain points by shortening the time required to resolve customer-service issues.

“SessionStack helps us troubleshoot tech support issues faster and gather real user data to improve our product instead of relying on gut feeling and risky assumptions”, said Craig Finch, Chief Information and Compliance Officer, Mend.

There is a free plan if you’d like to give SessionStack a try.