In January  2014 about half of traffic to Cleveland Clinic’s website came from mobile devices; today traffic from smartphones is approaching 70%, says Anthony Crimaldi, mobile marketing manager for the Cleveland Clinic.

“The rate of change was so fast and we don’t see it leveling off yet—mobile traffic is still increasing,” says Crimaldi, who joined the Cleveland Clinic four years ago when the medical center created his position. He adds more visitors come from smartphones than tablets, and the majority of smartphone visitors use Apple Inc. iPhones.

As a result, Cleveland Clinic recently decided it was time to invest some resources in its mobile health. It’s in the process of switching to responsive design, beefing up its main app and establishing a system that will update its site and its 18 apps simultaneously when Cleveland Clinic makes a change to its digital presence. And, it makes changes often, Crimaldi says.

For example, Cleveland Clinic has a database of thousands of physicians that constantly changes when new doctors join or others leave, doctors update their bios or an urgent care facility needs to be added to the database. The hope is that responsive design, which uses a single website codebase that dynamically adapts to the screen size the visitor is using, will relieve the operational headaches Cleveland Clinic faces now for its two sites—manually updating its dedicated mobile site as well as its desktop site for every change. Cleveland Clinic is taking automation one step further by building a system in-house that will also update all necessary apps when a change is made.

A web architect on staff is creating the specifications for the API, or application programming interface, that will plug into all the apps and the forthcoming responsive site to make changes automatically.

“We are overhauling our whole web services system,” Crimaldi says.

The Cleveland Clinic is also in final negotiations with a vendor to complete its new responsive design site, which it hopes will be ready by the end of October 2016. Since the contract is still being finalized, Crimaldi did not want to name the vendor.

Currently, Cleveland Clinic manages its dedicated mobile site in-house. But the existing mobile site offers just a small subset of the full site’s features, and with more than two-thirds of traffic stemming from mobile, Crimaldi knew it needed to offer mobile visitors a full site with more functionality.

For example, the current mobile site doesn’t allow visitors to make an appointment, doesn’t offer deep explanations of a range of conditions, illnesses and procedures, and visitors cannot connect to electronic medical records.

For the first stage of the responsive design project, Cleveland Clinic, with the help of its vendor, will dig into analytics to see how visitors are navigating its current mobile site. “We will look to see their primary uses,” Crimaldi says. “Are they looking up information on diseases,  looking up physicians or even looking for a job—we want to see how they are using our mobile site.” After that it will conduct usability tests offering prototypes of potential new sites and observe visitors interacting with the various iterations across a range of devices, Crimaldi says.

Cleveland Clinic is also updating and rebranding its main app, currently called the Today app, but which will soon be named the Cleveland Clinic app. A team of about 10 employees at the Cleveland Clinic work on the company’s mobile projects, including managing all the apps, and are they are primarily responsible for the overhaul, Crimaldi says.

The update will add features that enable patients to access electronic medical records and an appointment scheduling system that will be similar to how one would book a restaurant via Open Table where a patient can see the slots his doctor has open and select a convenient time. It will also improve its search functionality with the ability to search by physician, office and care locations, add search by condition, and beef up personalization. “We are doing story boarding right now,” Crimaldi says of the app, which Cleveland Clinic hopes to launch in Q1 of 2016.

Crimaldi adds that he is cautious not to “overpack” the app. The app, he says, will be mainly designed to help a patient easily complete a specific task, such as find a doctor or locate a nearby urgent care facility. Meanwhile, the site will feature health and wellness information, editorial and articles. “With the site, we want you to be able to sit down and dive in for hours,” Crimaldi says. “The app will have more specific purposes.”

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