Preview of the KaiNexus iPhone App – making improvement easier, anywhere

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KaiNexus has an initial v 1.0 iPhone app that's about ready to be submitted to Apple!

It's been an exciting past few months at KaiNexus, the software startup where I am the Chief Improvement Officer, as we are adding more paying customers in addition to our initial beta sites. When we meet with prospective customers, we learn a lot from those who ask questions and end up working with us. But, we also learn a ton from those who choose not to move forward with our platform for continuous improvement.

One feature that a lot of customers (and prospects) have asked for is a mobile app, specifically for the iPhone.

We're happy to be able to show a developer preview video for what will be our first iPhone/iOS app, put together by KaiNexus's Steve Good, who led this effort. The app will be submitted to Apple soon. Before the app, users had to log in to KaiNexus via a browser (most typically on a PC or Mac, although KaiNexus runs native on Android tablets or on an iPad via the OnLive Desktop Live app  or via the Puffin browser app).

Now, hospital staff members at KaiNexus sites can identify a problem or an Opportunity for Improvement (OI) and, instead of jotting it on a scrap of paper that gets lost or having to remember it until they can get to a computer, they can now pull out their own personal iPhone to enter that OI so it sends up right in the main web-based KaiNexus system (pictured at left, click for a larger view). They can take a photo and attach it to the OI, if they want, and the OI will be immediately be in the system.

See this preview video of the iPhone App (there's not any sound other than some background music):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCUc5Wi421I

Just so you know that this isn't vaporware, I have seen the live working demo where an OI entered on Steve's iPhone gets into our demo KaiNexus system. Once the OI is into KaiNexus, our software helps manage the entire improvement cycle:

  • Identify opportunity
  • Find root cause
  • Collaborate on possible countermeasures (including assigning tasks that are part of the improvement)
  • Collect data on the impact of the improvement
  • Communicate the changes to staff
  • Have metrics and a searchable archive of OIs

Steve was testing our app on an iPhone 3GS. For those who have the iPhone 4S and the Siri speech recognition capability (or older iPhone users with the Dragon voice recognition app), you can conceivably enter your OI using just your voice.

So what you see above might be the “minimum viable app” (being able to enter an OI) but it's a great start. There is a lot of detail and security behind the scenes, so the app is more complex than it might seem.

We'd love to hear your feedback on this and other possibilities… if you're not real familiar with KaiNexus, check out the 4-minute intro video on the front page of www.KaiNexus.com. If streaming media (like Vimeo) is blocked at your organization, there's an alternative link you can click on to view the video in a way that's more likely to work (or click here).


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Mark Graban
Mark Graban is an internationally-recognized consultant, author, and professional speaker, and podcaster with experience in healthcare, manufacturing, and startups. Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation. He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean. Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Mark,

    please check Evernote which offers more functionality than in the demo (therefore it is a demo :-)

    Lean is also reusing other apps for you own good, instead of developing ones own. I think it is better to think a proper use of notes, libraries and more in Evernote to reroute (lean) ideas, than to develop an own app.

    BTW: I don’t have any involvement in Evernote what’s so ever. I’m only a happy user.

    Yours,

    Caj Oosters
    head of healthcare administration
    Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

    • Caj – thanks for your comment. I probably haven’t done a good job of explaining how KaiNexus works and how it (and our app) are different than Evernote. I have used Evernote a bit, but I’d admit I’m not a heavy user or expert. My impression is that Evernote is designed for a single user to capture notes, photos, links, etc. that are useful for that single user.

      KaiNexus is designed to be used across hundreds or thousands of users in a health system with a shared database. The iPhone App is very limited compared to our full KaiNexus software. The App, for now, does nothing but capture an Opportunity for Improvement, or OI. The OI then appears in the main KaiNexus system, where OIs are visible to everybody, whether they are working on it or not.

      So I think there are major differences between what we have and what Evernote does.

      Mark

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