Healthcare

TeleHealth care app development is redefining the health care sector in 2020

June 09, 2020

The ongoing pandemic has pushed us to test most of the conventional wisdom. One of these tested phenomena is the belief that you have been in the physical proximity of the healthcare provider to get adequate care. This principle has existed for years in medicinal sciences. With the advent of more significant software development and the need to maintain social distancing, now is the opportune time to consider and move towards Telehealth.

At its core, Telehealth is a subset of E-Health. It shouldn't be confused with Telemedicine, which primarily focuses only on the clinical aspects of healthcare. TeleHealth App Development, on the other hand, includes the medicinal, administrative, and other ancillary services that form a part of an effective healthcare system.

Why is Telehealth Necessary?

With the onset of the pandemic, it has become imperative to have contactless healthcare accessible to all. The only way to do that is by harnessing the impact of Telehealth. Doctors and medicinal practitioners can interact with patients in a virtual environment, perform a diagnosis, and recommend the right curative or precautionary measures. That said, Telehealth has benefits way beyond the needs of this pandemic:

1. It Makes the Healthcare System More Efficient: Doctors and patients can interact faster, since physical commutes and waiting for appointments are unnecessary. This frees up time for everyone involved in the process.

2. It Makes Healthcare Accessible to More Patients: The geographic limits of attending a diagnostic session are eliminated. Adding to this, doctors have more time available to address the needs of more patients. This way, a larger number of patients can now get their desired healthcare.

3. Healthcare Becomes a Seamless Experience: In a traditional setting, a patient might have to see a doctor, a specialist, a chemist, and a lab technician again and again with appointments to complete the curative process. Telehealth shrinks this process dramatically since most document sharing, and clinical recommendations can be made virtually. Patients can order medicines online and save more time.

4. It Decreases the Cost of Healthcare: At its best, Telehealth reduces the administrative overheads a doctor might have to incur and transfer on to her patients. Since these overheads might not be necessary, the cost of healthcare for the patient can reduce.

5. Booking, Consultation, and Follow Up Get Integrated: As individual steps of a more extensive process, they consume more energy of the patient and the doctor. Telehealth puts it all under one banner of an integrated process: a patient undergoes booking and consultation, followed by reminders of lab tests, medicine doses, and follow-up appointments. This eliminates the chances of missed appointments or other critical steps in the process.

What is Required to Constitute a Functional Telehealth System?

The goal is to establish systems and processes that seamlessly allow patients, doctors, and administrators to conduct healthcare measures without meeting in person. Here are the key features of a functional telehealth system:

1. Detailed Analytics: One of the critical features of a Telehealth system is data analytics. In a conventional setting, the doctor or the administrator has no meta-analysis of their healthcare system. Neither does the patient have a granular understanding of her condition. Cloud-enabled dashboards and analytics systems report critical data that can help the doctor, the administrator, and the patient improve the healthcare process's performance.

2. Centralized Document Management: The success of analytics is a great feature, but it rests on this feature. IDs, appointments, reports, prescriptions, insurance documents, follow up reports, and miscellaneous notes are necessary throughout the process. In fact, if the patient is frequently visiting the doctor, the doctor has to keep them handy for an extended period. Simply digitizing them is not sufficient. They have to be accessible to all the key stakeholders as and when necessary.

Telehealth enables this with cloud storage and a centralized ERP system. This way, everyone with the right authorization can get access to the documents as and when she wants. Additionally, information browsing becomes a more straightforward process for the doctor.

3. Data Privacy and Security: The effectiveness of centralized document storage is complemented by robust data privacy and security implementation. This is more of a necessity and less of a feature for a well-engineered Telehealth system. Since patients are providing vital and personal data, the healthcare app development provider and technology vendor's responsibility is to encrypt and secure the data. The cloud architecture that surrounds the Telehealth systems should be engineered to provide this.

4. Integrated Communication & Notification Systems: From booking to appointment reminder to prescription, follow-up appointments, and report sharing, the Telehealth system has to ensure that all the communication is seamless, accurate, and automated. Conventional means of communication may include emails, chatbots, and even SMS alerts.

The apps, websites, and platforms being used should have accessibility to video conference with real-time document sharing, so the doctor can perform a diagnosis and make prescriptions.

5. Satisfactory Compliance to Key Policies: The fundamental law that a Telehealth system should generally follow should include Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), that governs how the Protected Health Information (PHI) is shared between the doctor, labs, insurers, and patients in a secure and privacy-protecting manner. One might have to look into the local data privacy and migration laws to ensure that the Telehealth system complies with every single rule.

6. Sync with Varied Data Sources: The type of data being stored would be significantly varied. This may include reports, prescriptions, and even onsite data collected by the doctor in her clinic. The Telehealth system will have to be equipped with the right tech stack to collect, store, and make this data accessible.

7. Comprehensive Process Closure Features: When a patient's case is closed, it does not mean the healthcare process has ended. There is billing, follow up documentation, and online payment integration, which have to be integrated into a comprehensive system. The data storage systems will have to be efficient enough to ensure that all the case data is stored in an optimally compressed manner.

8. On-Demand Platform Extensions: As the doctor and the clinic's workflow develops, the Telehealth system should be available for on-demand extensions. This may include dedicated apps, websites, chatbots, and ERP integrations.

Getting It Developed Vs. SaaS Solutions

Getting the right integration across all features, systems, and platforms, along with consistent support, updates, and functionality extensions, is critical to make the Telehealth system work. Generally, domain expertise and prior implementation experience are significant indicators of the system's success. Thus, go with a technology partner who has proven knowledge, previous product execution experience, and a reasonable degree of industrial credibility.

In Conclusion

Healthcare has gone through a significant revolution in the past few decades. New methods of diagnosis, medication, therapy, and testing have evolved. With the integration of the right Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Technology, Big Data, IoT, and Business Intelligence, the core delivery mechanism of healthcare is being revolutionized. Doctors who adapt to this change will have a more significant impact on their patients and will be able to run more efficient clinical practice.

If you’ve made the decision, we recommend getting in touch with us. We are pioneers in on demand healthcare app development. Our processes are airtight and development time is fast. Get the best version of your app developed with us.

Bhavesh Parekh

Bhavesh Parekh is a Director of X-Byte Enterprise Solutions, an ever-emerging Top Web and Mobile App Development Company with a motto of turning clients into successful businesses. He believes that client's success is company's success and so that he always makes sure that X-Byte helps their client's business to reach to its true potential with the help of his best team with the standard development process he set up for the company.