Types of Software the Healthcare Industry Needs to Improve In 2019
In the world of millions of software solutions, digital healthcare takes up a huge part of the technology market. According to Statista, the major segments of the digital healthcare market are Electronic Health/Medical Records (EHR/EMR), Telehealth, Mobile Health (mHealth), and Wireless Health.
The global digital health market was valued at 80 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 and is expected to increase to over 200 billion U.S. dollars by 2020.
These numbers prove that there’s no way back for the healthcare industry in terms of digitalization. Patients want their doctors to be easily accessible through online chatting. Hospitals want to get rid of paper records and easily manage their databases. The number of software solutions grows rapidly, hence grows the number of low-quality solutions or the ones that lack essential features. High-quality, feature-packed programs are a real rarity and are still demanded. There’s always space for improvement, and these days it’s security, stability, and functionality of healthcare digital systems. Let’s see what types of healthcare software still needs to be improved in 2019.
Enterprise Resource Planning & Patient Management Systems
Digital ERP systems help hospital staff to manage routine administrative tasks much easier. With ERP systems, employees can automate the purchase and tracking of medical equipment, tools, and drugs. They can make reports and keep all needed invoices right in the system, which saves time and prevents the loss of important data.
Patient Management systems help hospital staff to keep electronic health records in order. These records include such data about the patient as medical history, diagnoses, treatment prescriptions, results of medical examinations (cardiograms, x-rays, blood tests), and other.
Patient management systems also help nurses at the receptions keep a record of hospital visitors digitally. Overall, with patient management systems there’s no need to keep huge folders with handwritten records and allocate special places in the hospital for archives.
There are many systems that can handle these tasks. However, they are pretty old, well-rooted, and usually have a poor level of security, which explains numerous data breaches and leaks. Patient records usually contain such sensitive information as full names, ID and insurance numbers, phone numbers, and sometimes credit cards numbers. Engineers need to update the systems and perform security testing more thoroughly this year to combat all the mistakes of the last one.
Pharmaceutical Software
Similar to electronic health records, information about medicine also needs to be kept digitally. Pharmacists can’t remember all the peculiarities of drugs, their side effects, and optimal doses.
They also can’t keep the track of drugs in stock manually. Pharmaceutical software automatically tracks the number of each medicine in stock and synchronizes this information through the whole network of pharmacies. This way, we as patients are now capable of quickly googling whether specific meds are in stock of the exact pharmacy.
The main problem of pharmaceutical software is that it doesn’t usually perform fast and stable enough. Sometimes there are big lines in the pharmacy and software breakdowns may lead to the loss of customers’ patience. To avoid this problem, the software has to undergo a series of load/stress, and performance testing sessions.
TeleHealth & MHealth
TeleHealth and mHealth are broad terms that describe applications and software that run on telecom or internet technologies and allow patients to keep track of their health outside the hospital. Patients can receive help from doctors in the form of online consultations in any place in the world, where there’s a well-established network. Such apps allow patients to set reminders on taking certain pills and seeing a doctor, while also being useful for those who can’t always see doctors when there’s a need. With teleHealth, patients can receive general or more specific information about diseases and their treatments, and monitor their own treatment progress remotely. MHealth allows users to keep their daily health routines, receive guidance on sports, sleep, and mental health, and generally improve the quality of their lives.
TeleHealth applications face the common trouble of unstable signal from telecom service providers. Even though it doesn’t depend on the software quality, there’s still something engineers can do to improve teleHealth. Medical applications have to be made with those in mind, who live in remote areas of the world, very far from civilization and hospitals. Because of the lack of necessary software architectural features, not all phones support modern teleHealth apps. Engineers have to adapt such software and perform system and compatibility testing to check whether it works on all possible types of devices and systems.
MHealth apps, on the other hand, can be improved in terms of design and number of useful features. Sometimes, mobile applications stop working properly after updates. This issue can be solved with the help of regression testing, UI/UX testing, and functional testing.
Internet of Things & wearables
This is a hugely important part of the healthcare industry digitalization process. Wearables are the result of our recent technological progress, and they are already irreplaceable. In healthcare, IoT changed the way doctors perform diagnostics and tests. With insulin pens, ingestible sensors, and other smart laboratory equipment, doctors now can measure blood pressure and monitor glucose levels of the patient for less than a minute.
Such fast progress usually comes with a number of challenges. Software for wearables can’t be made with templates and reusable code. It is a hard job for engineers because each program has to be made uniquely for a specific device. For checking whether everything works how it’s supposed to work, engineers usually perform configuration testing.
Digitalization is what the healthcare industry was craving for a long time. Thanks to the huge leap in technological progress we are now able to the keep track of huge amounts of data online, help the ones who live very far from civilizations, detect diseases that were impossible to detect just a couple of years ago, and track our day to day health more efficiently.
