New app enhances patient experience
How to engage patients waiting to be seen by a doctor at a doctor’s office or hospital has been an age-old problem. Ez WaitingRoom provides a clear-cut answer. DSN spoke with CEO Ed Young about his vision to forever change this experience, and how drug store retailers fit into the equation.
DSN: Please describe ez WaitingRoom — what is it and how does it work?
Ed Young: The ez WaitingRoom app is a public place, content marketing program that enhances discovery of new content by people in doctors’ waiting rooms. We are launching in the second quarter of 2017 with more than 10,000 waiting rooms, representing more than 30.000 physicians with a potential patient reach exceeding 10 million monthly.
We plan to rapidly increase our reach by physician specialty through targeted partnerships with consumer brands. The app works by recognizing when the patient’s device — phone or tablet — is in one of our ez WaitingRoom-activated doctor’s offices. When in an activated office, the content library is unlocked and the patient is able to download and read magazines/books, watch video or play games in the library. The session lasts for four hours, but downloaded content is available to access as long as the person leaves it on his or her device.
DSN: What kind of content is available on ez WaitingRoom, and where are you sourcing it from?
Young: We are in the process of building our content library with magazines from select major publishers, gaming companies and some exclusive video providers. We are excited that we are going to have content that will appeal to people who are looking to occupy their time and enhance their experience, while waiting for their doctor’s appointment. Our partnership with Comag Marketing Group, [or CMG], the largest magazine distributor by a wide margin and one of the Jim Pattison Group Cos., has given us unique access to a broad range of premium content providers — both from their existing client base and from outside — from which we are able to selectively build out our library.
DSN: How do drug stores and pharmacists fit in? Why should retailers consider partnering with ez WaitingRoom?
Young: Our talks with physicians have found a desire for certain interactions with drug stores — they see drug stores and pharmacists as their partners in providing care to patients:
Coupons/coupon lookup for their patients for all types of products for sale at the location;
Drug interaction for their patients from the pharmacy’s system;
Indication of me-dical supply availability by actual store location; and
Drug price lookup is probably the No. 1 request. They would love to lookup drug pricing with patients at the time of writing the prescription, so a pharmacy that works with us would have the ability to make an offer at the most opportune moment and at the most opportune price, much like Google has been able to accomplish in the online advertising space.
DSN: How did you came up with the idea for ez WaitingRoom?
Young: David Maisel, my partner, is the founder of WRSS, [or] Waiting Room Subscription Services — the company that started putting print magazines in doctors’ offices, and I was a publisher for many years as one of the co-founders of The Source Magazine. Together, we realized that the future of magazine media and other content in doctors’ waiting rooms resided not on the tables of the waiting room or TV screens that people are forced to watch communally, but on the patients’ own mobile devices.
DSN: What’s the bottom line?
Young: The ez WaitingRoom app and public place program bring an unprecedented opportunity to the drug store community. By leveraging technology and current patient desires, we enable pharmacies to have positive and welcomed engagement with patients when they are getting their prescriptions written, and presumably right before they travel to the pharmacy itself. The best part of this is that these interactions are all on the patient’s terms, so it places the physician, the pharmacy and the pharmacist in the most positive light possible in the mind of the patient.