The Developer's Desk: Solving Complex Challenges in Software Development

mHealth is a widely used application in the market nowadays. As the demand for the health sector keeps increasing, the usage of mobile health apps is in high demand. The main steps of developing a mHealth app are discovery, specification requirements, engineering and design, development, testing, and ongoing support. Each of these stages consists of a broader view of insight. In this guide, we will focus on the following four main guidelines: What are the types of Healthcare apps? What are the features of Healthcare App Development features? What are the challenges faced in the mHealth Sector? What is the cost of a mHealth app? Let's get started! What are the types of Healthcare apps? There are two types of Healthcare applications as the applications are essential for the Healthcare providers and the Patients separately. First, let's shed light on the Healthcare apps essential for Healthcare providers as follows: Appointment and Hospital management apps Patient performance monitoring apps Reference and database apps EHR solutions Next, let's check out the apps designed specifically for patients. The following are the key apps designed for patients: Healthcare monitoring and management apps Nutrition management apps Education and self-diagnosis apps Mental wellness management apps Women health apps Reminder apps Though there is a diverse range of applications, common features are falling under most of these applications. Next, let's check out some common features. What are the features of Healthcare App Development features? The following are the pivotal common features in healthcare app development: Appointment Scheduling Reminders Health tracking Geolocation Patient information management Payment gateway Realtime chat options Ratings and Reviews Cloud integration Reporting and Analytics The appointment allows you to schedule appointments for a specific doctor. Here, the patients can schedule their appointments as per their requirements at any time. So, that the patients aren't stuck in a waiting room or any queues. Scheduling allows you to schedule the medicine consumption, tests, and amount of liquid required. Just like maintaining a reminder, the scheduling system would remind the clients to take their medicine and take their tests on time. A health tracking system would monitor the functionality of the patients. It keeps an in-depth eye on the conditions, blood pressure, calorie rate, pulse rate, improvements, and many more! It is a worthwhile tracking system from the patient's point of view. Geolocation is a map feature available on most maps. If there are no other doctors in the nearby locations, you can use the Geolocation feature to find out the doctors and hospitals closest to your current location. This is very helpful in an emergency. Patient information management handles the details of the patients systematically. Generally, it consists of the last access information to the app, the patient's medical history, past reports and status, prescriptions, the consulted doctors, and many more in chronological order. The payment gateway is the key feature of the healthcare application. It allows you to pay through debit, credit, and other third-party gateways to obtain their services. This is a method of income generation for app investors as well. Real-time chat options allow you to chat with the doctor or any reliable person to seek online medicine apps. Through this option, real-time texts, video calls, and voice calls are communicated over the network. Ratings and Reviews pave the way for judging a doctor or a hospital based on client reviews. So that only the most efficient people could survive in the market. This helps to build a strong foundation for doctors and hospitals to give the best services. Cloud integration allows you to keep the cloud-connected to get instant data from cloud sources. It is important to make sure the data in the cloud is safe and secure as well. Reporting and Analytics help to track the patient count, their health status, finances, and more new insights. Insights such as recurring patients and new patients would give a good track of information in the dashboard. What are the challenges faced in the mHealth Sector? There are three main challenges in developing a mHealth application, as follows: Compliance & regulations issues The Presence of multiple devices Lack of security Compliance & regulations issues Compliance and regulation issues are key factors in developing a mHealth application. Depending on the region, several rules and regulations should be followed. For example, if you are launching the app in the USA, the mHealth app needs to comply with HIPAA and PHI regulations. Additionally, CCPA, NIST, and GDPR (General Data Protection) also require adhesion. If you are launching from Canada, the PIPEDA(Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) regulations need to be followed. This applies to Canadians as well. Next, if you're launching the app from the United Kingdom, the regulations mentioned on the NSCS websites have to be followed. If the app targets the European Union, then the rules should adhere to GDPR (General Data Protection) regulations. The Presence of multiple devices Due to the entrance of new devices into the market, it is difficult to make apps that comply with these needs. Also, the app needs to operate on multiple devices simultaneously as well. This is a very challenging concept for developers. It is difficult to comply with all the needs as well as maintain security throughout the platform. The interoperability among multiple devices has to be maintained accordingly. Lack of security Security is the other key area for the development of mHealth applications. The developers need to ensure the security of the application in all terms. This includes protecting the app from hackers, and payment issues, and securing the patients' and doctors' data as well. In between the scenes, there are so many security issues such as authentication and authorization that need to be regulated appropriately. What is the cost of a mHealth app? Generally, the cost of the application depends on the features and the complexity of the application. It also depends on the location the app is launched, the target audience, and the mHealth development company charges as well. As per the Research 2 Guidance data, a mobile health app costs $425,000 approximately. This is for a mHealth application developed from Scratch as well. Overall, it depends on several factors to determine a price. It can be too high or reasonable, which depends on several external and internal factors. Conclusion In conclusion, we discussed the main types of mHealth apps available for development for patients and doctors separately. We also discussed the common features expected in mHealth app development and their purpose of functionality as well. Next, the challenges driven forth for mHealth app development are crucial due to the regulation and security factors. Finally, we briefed a general idea on the cost of development of a mHealth app development. That's it! I hope this blog was handy to brief your knowledge on mobile Health App Developments and if you have any queries about this blog feel free to Contact us.

Healthcare Automation in the Medical Industry is a drastic development in economic development. Many hospitals and Medical services are developing towards automation. In this guide, we will discuss in the depth the automation that took place in the Medical industry and the key use cases to give a brief idea. The benefits of this automation are a wide variety expected to cover at the end of the blog. Let's get going! Automation in the Medical Industry Automation is a rapid transformation in the Healthcare industry. It has affected many areas, including the usage of digital technology, automation procedures, and plenty of ways to increase the productivity of work activities. Moreover, patients benefit through the process of automated healthcare. They are offered the best services. The healthcare administration is highly improved in terms of automation activities. The clients are treated with a higher level of satisfaction, and good and healthy practices, improving the productivity of the healthcare or medical industry, enhancing the productivity of the users and administrative activities. What are the main areas of automation in the Medical Industry? The following are the key automation activities that took place in the automation of the medical industry: Data Extraction Capability to Adjust Reduction in costs Increased Efficiency Faster Billing Higher Levels of Consumer Utility Data Extraction Data extraction takes place in EHR machines to increase the usage of relevant data effectively. Data is extracted from the database and related sources efficiently to grow the technology usage. It organizes the work of the users in an organized manner and improves the client and user experience. Power to Adjust One of the main automation technologies used is Machine Learning technology. This enhances the workforce of the industry and the patient volume in emergent rooms. This factor automatically reduces the ambulatory waiting period and saves a lot of lives simultaneously. As the data is stored, based on specific seasonal changes, administrators can find the need for more medicine or staff as well. Moreover, the demand can be forecasted in advance and necessary precautions are taken to handle the future situation. Reduction in costs Why do Hospital Management administrators or investors spend a large sum of money on infrastructure to automate the healthcare industry? The main goal is to reduce the cost and save money. Though the investment is higher, the turnover is even higher through automation. The overtime spent on activities is reduced, which increases the productivity, and reduces the staff, and specific staff with reasonable or low salaries is recruited to decrease the errors. Moreover, the administrative stress is reduced while the reliability is increased as well. This can lead to focusing more on ways to improve the healthcare infrastructure and healthcare services. Increased Efficiency Through the process of developing automation, efficiency is automatically increased. This leads to high work productivity and decreased error levels. Patient diagnosis automation tools are available as well. It diagnoses and treats the patients through automated activities. Activities for Quick Billing For quick billing activities, AI (Artificial Intelligence) is handy. When all the automation activities related to billing are fed and trained for the machines, quick billing takes place. Certainly, the workers can generate the bills easily to increase consumer utility. Higher Levels of Consumer Utility Consumer satisfaction has increased drastically through automation. The care taken towards the patients is specialized. If the patient is pleased, this turnover more patients and creates a challenging situation to handle more patients simultaneously. Therefore, increasing the levels of automation strategies would help to develop healthcare services or achieve business goals as well. What are the healthcare automation use cases? Medical automation services are used in various instances to manage the workloads in the healthcare sector. Various healthcare automation systems are handy to benefit the industry and increase productivity. Let's discuss the key use case of medical automation! Patient Booking Systems Excellent patient booking systems are automated instead of traditional booking systems. In a healthcare industry or hospital in the traditional booking system, plenty of calls keep coming daily, and it is challenging to answer all the calls to make the booking. But, in an automated booking system, the scheduling conflict is reduced. The patients or representatives can log in to the system and place the bookings as per the requirements. Patient Check-In Systems Automated patient check-in systems are placed at the front desks of the doctors. Here, patients can fill out the necessary forms and complete the procedures by themselves. This saves the time of the administrative staff. Instead of communicating with the receptionist, the patients can perform their tasks by themselves easily and reliably. There is a high level of productivity in automated patient check-in systems and a reduction in the errors made by the staff. Refined Request Management Requesting certain services and getting a response is an ineffective task in traditional healthcare management systems. But, in automation systems, requests for certain services are placed and the response is assured as well. This increases the productivity and time of the staff and patients alike. The customers receive great satisfaction over the responsibility and service of the healthcare or hospitals. Virtual Doctor Consultation System Here, the traditional patient-doctor system of consultation doesn't take place. Patients can log in with virtual doctors, answer a few standard questions, and get the diagnosis easily. The computer collects the patient's symptom information and diagnoses the illness easily. Technically, they can not replace real doctors, but they can help to manage the patient load in an emergency. For example, if the doctor can't attend the hospital due to an emergency or if the patient needs to be allowed to be alone due to an illness, and many more emergencies Data Retrieval and Extraction System Patient and staff data are stored in the respective databases. The hospitals can access this data at any time as per the requirements. Therefore, data retrieval and extraction are very easy to handle. The administrators can instantly view and change the data as well. If there are several divisions, the data transfer among the divisions is effective too. As the systems are interconnected to one another, data transfer and access are effective. It saves the user time and administrative costs by collecting data faster than the traditional method. As the storage of data is a big task in the healthcare sector, efficiency and safety are achieved through proper automation technologies. What are the benefits of Automation in the Medical Industry? The following are the key benefits of Automation in the medical industry: An increase in efficiency for the administration and patients Enhanced customer satisfaction Increase in the productivity of the administration and patients Decrease in the stress levels of the administration and patients Improve digital and emergency support Quick data transfers Reduces the overall errors caused by the administration Reduction in costs Conclusion In conclusion, we discussed medical automation and the key areas developed under medical automation. We learned the main use cases in the healthcare sector and the benefits of using automation services in the healthcare sector. So, we hope this guide was handy to brush up on your knowledge of automation services in the medical industry. If you have any queries about this blog Feel free to Contact Appic Softwares.

A guide for starters.  In recent years, there has been a huge increase in demand for online healthcare platform. More than seventy per cent of the patient population agrees that access to the medical professions on mobile apps or websites provides great help. There is increased demand for digitalization in the healthcare sector.    Based on Appic Softwares' experience with real-life projects, I have included some must-have features for healthcare applications in this article. Healthcare platforms can have different features depending on the requirements, user base, environment, etc. The main goal of such a platform is to make it easier for the patients to contact their health care providers and vice versa. M-HEALTH: A CRUCIAL INDUSTRY    The health care industry in the United States was valued at about 3.8 trillion USD in the year 2021 and this value will increase many folds in the coming years. This is the reason why m-health is the need of the hour.    There are 301 physicians available per 100,000 people in the US. In India, the doctor-population ratio is 1:834. These numbers are extremely worrisome.    It is very difficult for our healthcare providers to treat all the people requiring medical attention when there is such a scarcity of doctors.   How can we solve this problem?    Yes, increasing the number of doctors and encouraging more and more people to join the medical profession sounds great. But do we have the resources?   As a country, we will have to improve the medical academic facilities and increase the number of medical colleges and existing infrastructures.   But how can we find an immediate solution to this problem?    Using online healthcare platforms helps medical professionals to engage with more patients in a given timeframe than when consultation is done face to face.   A large number of patients with similar symptoms can be consulted at the same time.    There can be a separate section and record of the treatment so that no time is wasted in finding previous medical records or re-accessing the patients. Patients can have all the information on their devices and this makes the whole process a lot easier.    The union of the IT industry and the Healthcare industry will lead to  the improvement of society as a whole.    Doctors will be able to see their patients remotely and everyone would be able to get basic medical health in their time of need. The cost of treatment will also decrease and the healthcare providers would be able to cut their fees. A win-win situation for all. This is why healthcare management should jump into the IT sector to improve their services and business.     THINGS TO PONDER UPON BEFORE STARTING THE M-HEALTH BUSINESS    What is the goal of your platform? Like we set treatment goals before making a plan for the patients, it is important to set your goals for your m-health platform.   To determine the goals it is important to what would be the services you want to offer?    What kind of platform do you want to go for? Mobile apps, Websites, Web apps?   What user base you would like to target?   What features you would like to add to your platform?   What would be your budget?   Now that you have the answers to the above questions, let's decide what tech stack you would want for your platform.    If you want healthcare app development, do you want one that works for both iOS and Android? I would suggest you go for a hybrid language like Flutter as one code would suffice for both types of devices with slight changes. It will lead to a faster and more budget-friendly medical app development.   You can also go for native iOS and Android languages for your mobile health app development.    It would all depend on what you want for your platform and would be easier to select once you have clear goals.   If you want a website, do you want it to be built from scratch, what tech stack do you want to go with? Or you would like to go with CMS like WordPress, Shopify, Magento, etc.    What do YOUR users want? When deciding on the features of your Healthcare platform it is very important to know your user base. What would be your target audience? Are you building the platform for a particular specialty or it would be multi-specialty?   For example, a mobile application for Obs. and Gynae will have a user base consisting primarily of females. It will have features revolving around obs. and Gynae like tracking menstrual cycles, booking sessions with the Gynaecologist, etc.    The patient information visible to the doctor on a priority basis will also depend upon the specialty of medicine.    Features of healthcare platform? A healthcare platform can have several different platforms and this will depend greatly on your requirements. What data is important to your practice, your goals, and the services you provide. And of course your target patients.    An Orthopaedic practice's m-health platform will be a lot different from a dental platform and both functionalities will be there in addition to other features for a multi-specialty platform.    There are several different types of the medical healthcare platform available for medical facilities, depending on the requirements of the users, like:   M-health Applications Data Management Softwares Care Management Softwares Hospital Softwares  Patient Analysis Softwares Softwares for managing appointments  Electronic Health Record  Medical Video Conferencing Platforms Electronic prescriptions    mHealth bridges the gaps in the healthcare system by ensuring easy and transparent communication between patients and healthcare providers.    Clear communication is very important in the medical sector and I feel that it is lacking in our current healthcare system.   With healthcare platforms, doctors can communicate with the patients, among themselves, and the hospital staff, and there will be records for all the data to ensure zero chances of error in taking the best care of the patients.    The United States Food and Drug Administration has also established practices to keep the digital health records of all patients.    M-health is the need of the hour and I encourage all our healthcare professionals and administrators to look into taking their consultations and treatment online.   Online platforms have proved to be a great help for our health care professionals in maintaining a safe distance while continuing to treat their patients.   This way we can ensure that our patients are been taken care of despite whatever is going on. It is the easiest way for the patients to reach their doctors.    mHealth can never take the place of a good old physical examination, but in today's environment, the requirement of such platforms can also not be ignored.     “The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” ― Voltaire   Health care platforms help patients to interact with doctors directly without visiting the hospital. This is used to maintain the health record for effective collaboration between doctors and patients.   Want a customized M-health platform for your business? Get in touch with us today at Appic Softwares.