The development of the medical sphere doesn’t seem to stop — especially today. This year, the Black Swan factor of global pandemics created an extra burden for healthcare and increased the importance of medical service quality.
According to Deloitte, the overall spending on healthcare is expected to grow by the year 2023. And after the lockdown experience, the demand for healthcare software development solutions has also increased.
In the new reality, the majority of medical organizations lack experience in working with healthcare software solutions. For this reason, we’ve collected everything you need to know about healthcare software development and provided recommendations to help your company or organization benefit from the new rules.
Healthcare Software Development Definition
In essence, healthcare software development covers the huge amount of activities directed on solving the problems within organizations in the healthcare sector and the relations between caregivers and patients. The industry involves clinical services, hospitals, medical equipment providers, financing for medicine, and research centers.
Software development for healthcare systems establishes an entire ecosystem where healthcare services gain higher quality and accuracy.
This technological innovation comes in the form of machine learning, Big Data, and e-health and creates an opportunity to enhance patient experience and equipment involved.
The Typology of Healthcare Software Development
- Medical Practice Management Software. This technology is requested for maintaining clinical workflow and optimizing everyday operations. It assists in keeping medical records, setting appointments, managing finances, and accounting activities.
- Electronic Health Record Software. The design allows the maintenance and management of patient data in electronic records. The reports stored include information about allergies, laboratory conclusions, medical history of a patient, and demographic statistics.
- E-Prescribing Software. It’s the technology that allows sending medical prescriptions directly to drug stores and pharmacies. It strengthens the connections within the healthcare industry and serves the patient comfort, among all.
- Urgent Care. This healthcare software category unites numerous apps that help patients get emergency aid without attending the doctor’s office.
- Hospital Management Software. This set of technologies optimizes hospital management. These solutions assist in billing, assigning insurance, managing patient information, and administrative work.
- Healthcare CRM. This software type works with customer management. The main task is to maintain better relations with clients — meaning better care quality, contact management, and accurate performance reports.
What Do Healthcare Software Development Companies Do
The greater demand for technological solutions in the medical sphere caused the appearance of narrow-specialized healthcare software development companies.
They offer assistance to non-governmental organizations, hospitals, and medical schools through a wide set of optimization services. At the same time, the requested enhancement range calls for finding a truly reliable software development partner.
From the standpoint of medical institutions, the reason to introduce IT solutions is mostly cost-oriented. Among all, a hired software development company should solve the task of greater financial efficiency through cost optimization.
And here, the technologies can provide data to control financial KPIs, emergency analytics, and client behavior. With these parameters, the spending on healthcare software development company becomes justified.
3 types of service that healthcare software development companies offer:
- Healthcare software — all the technologies aimed at assisting data management and improving the care quality,
- Healthcare apps — the mobile solutions for tracking and communication on health state,
- Custom solutions — task-oriented software or a mobile solution designed specifically on the customer request.
Healthcare software development companies mainly focus on task-oriented solutions — to provide the most accurate result and ensure client satisfaction. Nevertheless, the highest aim of any technological introduction is to establish an all-in-one healthcare ecosystem. And so, a high-end software development company always offers a comprehensive set of services for healthcare organizations — involving IT consulting, mobile/web development, cloud technologies, and IT outsourcing.
While there is still a lot of uncertainty and challenges around the digital transformation in the Healthcare Industry, our expertise allows us to consider a variety of technologies, use cases, and solutions for a software consultancy.
Intellectsoft has strong domain expertise for advising the right solutions to solve particular business challenges and avoid pitfalls while delivering and deploying them. Find these and other answers to your questions by getting in touch with our healthcare experts.
What Is a Custom Healthcare Software Development
Healthcare institutions are different and offer various solutions. That’s why custom healthcare software development appeared as a customized solution to the needs of a client. Among various advantages, it can help medical entities establish a unified platform for storing medical information. As a result, each applicant can get results of higher inclusiveness, performance, and scalability.
In general, clients request custom healthcare software development when they need a specific solution to one of these problems:
- Optimizing the work with patient records
- Facilitating communication between caregivers and patients
- Ensuring the smooth formation and interchange of individual health plans and strategies
- Providing a better accuracy of diagnoses
- Cutting extra expenses
If you have any of these requests, you can request a custom solution.
Nearshore Software Development for Healthcare
When it comes to the specifics of the software development healthcare industry, it’s better to work under a cost-effective nearshore model.
Among all, this approach allows reaching the top developers and disregard the distance limits to a certain extent. Moreover, each country has different economic conditions, enabling healthcare clients to choose among various pricing models. Moreover, the nearshore solution accelerates the requested technological change.
While choosing the exact nearshore partner for your healthcare software, ensure this provider has these abilities:
- To protect intellectual property
- To ensure the safety of your app
- To give you real value-for-money
- To overcome the cultural differences caused by a distant business environment
The Specifics of Healthcare Software Application Development
In the sphere of healthcare, software developers dedicate significant attention to creating user-friendly and attractive apps. In the contemporary smartphone-obsessed world, the development focus on mobile apps had nothing but show up.
With this solution, the list of exact areas for improvement may include an appointment system, a platform for laboratory control, and a mobile nutrition app. However, the exact appearance and number of features depending on the sophistication of the design and the concrete needs of the client.
Reaching smartphone functions enriches the quality of medical service an app can provide. In particular, mobile healthcare apps’ features can include GPS navigation to the hospital, push notifications about the upcoming medical examination, and file sharing through electronic libraries.
The classification for medical apps includes such groups of solutions:
- For doctors — automation of medicine prescriptions, patient visits, and personnel communication
- For patients — options to make online appointments, get laboratory results, and get push notifications
- For clinics — control over finances and equipment, service quality, and data flow
- For self-care — fitness and nutrition tracking apps to help people maintain a healthy lifestyle
- For health control — the set of mobile health applications that assist in tracking the main body parameters and treatment progress
What Are the Advantages of Healthcare Apps
Among the benefits top healthcare apps offer, medical organizations become able to guarantee the improved quality of service and boost client satisfaction. In particular, software solutions include electronic recording, enterprise content management (ECM), various kinds of CRM, and patient portals.
All these tools provide the digital playgrounds for communicating complaints and suggestions, suggestions, resulting in greater transparency and instant responses to problems that occur. Here is the list of concrete advantages custom healthcare software development has:
- Better synchronization and awareness of health system for building individual patient plans
- Wellness-centered approach
- Meeting the growing demand for virtual health service
- Improving the accuracy of treatment
- Ability to address the problems of population health
- Increasing consumer engagement
- Improving security and control management of essential data
- Getting access to the advanced technologies and alternative revenue sources they promise
Software Development Life Cycle for Healthcare
The specifics of the healthcare calls for adjusting software development practices for its needs. Here are the common steps for leading medical software development process:
- Requirements setting: collecting all the information around the healthcare organization to determine the needs to address
- Prototype development: conducting assessments and gathering details to propose a raw solution
- Design and programming: establishing a technological solution
- Software testing: verifying the absence of errors, bugs, and other problems
- Final adjustments: validating the software solution and delivering it to a healthcare institution
If your task is to create a custom healthcare software, the action plan slightly changes:
- Select the target audience — identify the tastes, preferences, and typical behavior of clients
- Sketch the software architecture — establish the detailed idea of healthcare IT solutions that meets the needs and demands of your target audience
- Elaborate UI/UX design — the customized solution requires closer attention to usability and intuitiveness of an app
- Protect the technology — involve encryption for data protection
- Integrate the software — the customized solution is always a part of the IT infrastructure of an institution
What’s the Future of Software Development in Healthcare
According to Deloitte, the future of the healthcare sector is in working towards prevention and early treatment, not in dealing with symptoms of diseases. In this dimension, healthcare custom software development deepens this progress by creating space for open communication between patients and doctors. In the near future, we will witness the greater trust and effectiveness of the medical service provided.
This direction especially strengthens the human-centered approach in healthcare, meaning dedicating the huge effort to create value. In this case, patient portals are very promising. They link numerous advantages of solutions in the area, including optimization of treatment plans, easy tracking of health progress, and availability of online professional consultations.
Moreover, these benefits lead to a value-based healthcare system. From the standpoint of business, this approach results in greater brand management, reputation increase, and better service delivery.
The key trends of software development in healthcare are:
- Focus on self-care and online communication (via a patient portal, especially). People become more interested in maintaining healthy without medical involvement and staying in touch with their doctors remotely,
- Involvement of blockchain innovation. This technology contributes to democratization in the sector significantly. Specifically, blockchain safely discloses internal operations, making the exchange more transparent, trustworthy, and collaborative.
- Expanded EMR software. In the new reality, each medical record will become digital and link all the specialties separated currently.
- Telemedicine. This innovation creates close remote connections between physicians and patients, eliminating all the traditional barriers between them.
- AI. The technology increases the accuracy of diagnoses and treatment plans.
Even though the perspectives of healthcare IT solutions seem bright, there are still some shortcomings that may arise. Among all, the introduced software should dynamically meet safety concerns, since this challenge is one of the most common for contemporary digital solutions. Moreover, Big Data causes problems with its management — which is, again, a serious challenge for software maintenance.
How Can Intellectsoft Help You Overcome the Greatest Challenge in a Software Development Project in Healthcare
Intellectsoft offers high-quality assistance in the design and development of various kinds of healthcare software. By referring to us, you can be sure the solution provided will serve you long, integrate into your digital ecosystem successfully, and manage the data accurately.
We empower companies and their workforce with cutting-edge transformative solutions and data-driven insights. Are you and your organization ready to shift the mindsets and get the most out of innovations?
Talk to our experts and find out more about the topic and how your business or project can start benefiting from it today!