Today, healthcare development service is one of the most demanded niches of software development. This is evidenced by statistics: more than 60% of patients in countries with strong economies either actively use or are going to use medical applications. In addition, last year, the global capitalization of the healthTech niche exceeded $50 billion. According to analysis, this is just the beginning — according to forecasts, in ten years this figure will be three times higher!
Are you aiming to conquer the niche of digital healthcare solutions? Then you definitely need to check out our list of trending features that will take your product to the top and ensure its long-term competitiveness.
User-Friendly Authorization and Authentication
If the first stages of using your application for its users are difficult, they are unlikely to consider it the best in their niche and will try to find a more convenient analog. As for healthcare-related apps, here the authorization procedure should be as simple as possible since users with limited physical abilities can go through it. To ensure a positive user experience, minimize the number of input fields and offer options for registering in the application using existing accounts in popular social networks and email services.
Live Video Broadcast
You have probably heard of the concept of telemedicine. In fact, this is the remote provision of medical services (for example, monitoring the patient's condition and consultations) and the interaction of medical workers with each other using telecommunication technologies. Today, solutions based on this technological concept are extremely relevant — primarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When the vast majority of medical centers are unable to provide quality care with their old methods, given the burgeoning number of patients, technology steps in to fill the gap.
Monitoring of Vital Signs
It will also be useful to implement the option of monitoring the vital signs of patients' health in your application. The application can record specific indicators or independently track the dynamics of recovery. This approach simplifies the work of doctors significantly and encourages patients to monitor their health carefully.
Doctor Appointment Option
Another great option is to create an electronic queue for an appointment with a doctor. Instead of having to do it over the phone or offline, patients now only need to press a couple of buttons and choose a time that is convenient for them. As for doctors, this approach allows them to optimize their workloads and avoid situations where several patients mistakenly sign up for the same time.
EHR Integration
If your application functions on behalf of a particular medical center, it makes sense to integrate it with the local EHR system — for example, through an API. Thus, you centralize all data and can update patient information remotely, through the application.
Integration with Third-Party Software Solutions
Obviously, integration with more than just EHR can benefit a particular medical center. In particular, you can link your software to CRM, ERP, and other systems that are regularly used by the medical center for which you are developing software.
Prescriptions
In order to automate the process of interaction between the doctor and the patient, you can partially transfer the admission procedure online. In particular, instead of ending a visit to the doctor with the traditional writing of a paper prescription (sometimes with incomprehensible handwriting), you can integrate the function of creating digital prescriptions, which patients can access directly from their smartphones. An even more advanced version of such a constructor will be its integration with pharmacy databases, which will tell patients whether the required medicines are currently available. Learn more about our capabilities in digitizing of the patient's experience.
Push Notifications
Instant notifications, which can pop up even when the app is inactive, are also a very useful feature. They can be responsible for both taking medications on time and rescheduling visits to the doctor. On the other hand, their frequency and quantity should be moderate — otherwise such spamming will force the user to delete your application quickly.
AI-Based Chatbots
Today, when the number of patients often exceeds the number of telephone operators ready to process their requests immediately, it is very important to have an alternative tool that would allow medical centers to maintain the same quality of service. In particular, instead of forcing patients to wait for a response from the operator on the line, you can offer them to use the services of a chatbot (for example, based on artificial intelligence). In this way, you will save patients time and eliminate the need to expand the staff of the call center.
Dashboard with Low Entry Threshold
This is another important component that determines the usability quality of your product. In particular, an intuitive dashboard with the logical and consistent placement of functions and tools will lower the entry threshold for new users and provide the widest possible coverage for the target audience — including by adding users with disabilities to it. It would be great if you also provide voice input for users with fine motor skills disorders.
Payment Gateway
For applications that provide an alternative to offline medical center services, for the convenience of patients, you can integrate a payment gateway so that they can pay for these services directly from the application. In addition, if you have provided integration with pharmacy databases in advance, this feature will allow single or house-bound patients to also order medicines with the possibility of incorporating home delivery services.
Adaptation for Wearables
As practice shows, one of the primary groups of users of wearable devices are people who either actively take care of their health or those who currently have diseases that require constant monitoring of their vital signs. This clearly shows that wearable devices can be integrated with applications aimed at collecting and analyzing patient health indicators.
Multi-Language Support
Even though the vast majority of the world's population understands English to some extent, you need to be prepared for the fact that the application will have to be adapted for narrower language groups — especially when it comes to an application created for a particular medical center. You should be aware that older populations may not have the required level of English proficiency to use your application smoothly. If you satisfy the needs of patients in using the national language, their degree of loyalty to your application and the medical center, in particular, will increase.
VR and AR concepts
One of the most trending technological concepts in software development is augmented and virtual reality. With such integration, you can create a completely new level of visualization, which is extremely useful, for example, when collecting patient history and tracking the progress of their recovery. As for augmented reality, in terms of implementation and target audience coverage, it is still a more accessible technology than virtual reality, since it does not require the use of any third-party devices other than a smartphone.
Privacy Policies
If you plan to develop an application for a wide target audience, you need to ensure that it complies with local and global user data security policies. The most relevant privacy standards include HL7, HIPAA, and GDPR. They ensure users that their data is not used by any third-party services and entrepreneurs for their personal purposes, and can be deleted as required by their owner.
Conclusion
We hope that we have helped you find out the most trending solutions for the health tech industry, and now you know how to make your digital product both competitive and attractive. So, now it's up to you to choose among them those that best meet your business needs!
Contact us to learn more about our engineering capabilities in health tech.
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