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Custom software development. How can it benefit your medical company?

The core demands towards medical companies have remained unchanged over a long period of time. However, while our modern medical history experienced the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry (along with most others) paved its way through digital transformation.

Digitisation of healthcare is constantly increasing and creating opportunities for more efficient processes. Custom healthcare software and general medical solutions are essential building blocks for telemedicine and the future of Healthcare 4.0, e.g. patient platforms, patient engagement platforms, health monitoring, AI-driven tools or wearable devices.

My experience working in a bespoke software development company has taught me that it is more valuable to invest in long-term partnerships with an IT vendor than to change vendors and services frequently. This is especially true for medical companies that seek to provide excellent patient experience, high-quality services and adopt the latest technologies to accomplish all this.

Custom software development offers all the benefits from digital transformation but also brings an additional touch of making the software solution fit the exact needs of your medical company.

The Rise of Telemedicine

We’ve all observed how telemedicine has surged over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. All over the world, medical companies are investing in technological solutions to help them become more efficient.

A recent report on UK’s connected health reveals evidence-based benefits of implementing telemedicine solutions such as reduced paperwork, fewer outpatients and more patient appointments per day.

But rather than just simply being a passing trend, telemedicine has numerous practical implications that reduce medical costs, automate manual documentation and provide better treatment outcomes. Plus, by providing telemedical services, your medical company can put a greater focus on the importance of prevention.

Custom software development allows you to personalise all your desired telemedicine app features depending on your goals. For example, suppose your medical company aims to solve the problem with the low-quality doctor-patient relationship. In that case, an experienced healthcare development company can help you create a simplified User Interface (UI) and a more appealing User Experience (UX) that support patient engagement.

Custom Health Tracking Apps

Although health tracking apps are not exclusively associated with professional medical software, they can play a key role in the digitisation of healthcare. For example, similar to patient engagement platforms, they can help boost user engagement by sending notifications, reminders and visualising key data.

The apps typically fall into one of three categories: nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing, or combine specific features from each category. Health tracking apps are often paired with wearable devices that can collect more accurate health-related data, e.g. heart rate, exercise level throughout the day and sleep quality during the night, or even act as a blood glucose tracker or thermometer.

One promising idea for the future is to eventually sync these health tracking apps with actual electronic health records (EHRs) so that they provide more in-depth personal information and better treatments. Also, the ways your medical company can utilise the collected data depends on your business goals.

By going for custom software development, you can use the data to drive better remote patient care, create long-lasting habits of the app users or use the data to generate predictive analytical models that outline and predict individual health-related risks.

Patient Engagement Platforms

In 2022, there are numerous patient engagement platforms out there. Some of them serve as medical business platforms, patient-centric platforms, while others are dedicated to a specific disease, e.g. cancer or MS. As their name suggests, their main goal is to boost patient engagement by providing curated content for the specific audience needs.

One of the best strategies your medical company can implement if you decide to build such a platform is to make the UI/UX design as intuitive and appealing as possible, contributing to higher user satisfaction.

In our digitally-driven economy, capturing your client’s attention means you’ve done a good job. Last but not least, all-in-one fully integrated platforms are solving the problem of the fragmentation of the patient journey of modern healthcare systems. Nearly 80% of doctors are specialists, meaning that if patients go to see a cardiologist, then an ophthalmologist, they will receive different opinions based on the doctor’s expertise area. Thus, patients need more holistic solutions that help them understand their health better.

We at Dreamix have such as success story in our portfolio featuring StoryMD, a platform that translates health data into a visual story, boosting patient engagement. The custom medical solution has four pillars: CMS/LIbrary, Health Journal, Communities and a visual personal health record.

Digitisation of Healthcare Through AI and ML

As trending technologies in custom software development, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning (ML) have numerous use cases that help drive the digitisation of healthcare forward. There is even no need to build entirely AI or ML-based applications to achieve certain software capabilities such as predictive analytics, improved diagnostic process, enhanced workflow or cost optimisations.

Especially when it comes to enhanced diagnosis, AI can play an indispensable role. In some cases, custom healthcare software solutions with AI tools can offer simple data sharing, chatbot functions or diagnosis acceleration, while in other cases, it may offer advanced features such as early symptom detection and recovery plans.

In any case, AI solutions offer great potential for the future of medicine. AI and ML carry vast unexplored potential, especially when it comes to data mining, handling Big Data and next-level predictions. In a healthcare context, it is much easier for a custom software solution with a built-in ML module to detect and recognise repeatable patterns, make accurate data-driven predictions and generally improve patient outcomes.

Blockchain Technology in Healthcare

A blockchain is a distributed, public database. In the context of cryptocurrencies, this distributed database is used to manage monetary transactions. The reason it is called a “chain” is that data transactions form block sequences and organise them in chains to which the transactions are added in chronological order.

The revolutionary aspect of blockchain is that once a transaction is finished, the information can’t be changed, meaning that app security is guaranteed. What about blockchain technology in healthcare?

Let’s say blockchain technology is used as a basis for your next custom medical software, which is a solution for handling patient data. Here, data security and compliance would be of utmost importance and blockchain technology will allow you to store all patient’s data securely. Most notably, this data could be much more easily shared with patients and other medical professionals involved.

This means that not every doctor would have to constantly re-enter sensitive patient data in a different way and would then need to give the patient paper documents or CDs would be eliminated. According to Forbes, some companies already utilise blockchain technology for contract management between medical companies and partner institutions, secure EHR modular suites or next-level security solutions in healthcare.

Author Biography Aleksandrina Vasileva

Aleksandrina is a Content Creator at Dreamix, a custom software development company, and is keen on innovative technological solutions with a positive impact on our world. Her teaching background mixed with interests in psychology drives her to share knowledge. She is an avid reader and enthusiastic blogger, always looking for the next inspiration.