How to Develop Healthcare Software: A HealthTech Startup Guide

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With the global pandemic, there is a huge demand for software development in the healthcare industry. If you are wondering how to develop healthcare software, you should consult our guide. We can help you get started with a custom medical software development company.

What Type of Healthcare Custom Software Development Solutions Should I Invest In?

Before you can look at how to make health software, you have to decide which solution you’d like to build. There are a number of products you can investigate, including:

Practice Management Software: This is CRM software that allows you to integrate your clinical and admin processes more efficiently, e.g., booking appointments. This can include a scheduling solution, billing solution, or even e-prescriptions.
Electronic Medical Records: Medical practices and hospitals generate a lot of paperwork. You could launch a system that allows these facilities to archive their paperwork digitally.
Patient Portals and Apps: Telemedicine apps allow doctors to consult with patients digitally, send feedback or disseminate helpful educational information.

How to Develop Healthcare Software That Really Works

Once you know what type of software you’d like to build, you can start fleshing out your plan and hire a custom medical software development company.

Decide Who to Target

Who will the end-user of your solution be? Are you targeting doctors, hospital administrators, expectant mothers, or other patients? Create a user persona for every potential customer. This means writing a biography of a hypothetical customer and their motivation for using your product. Analyze their needs and desires and build your features accordingly. You’ll also use these insights for your marketing campaigns once the product launches.

Pick the Features You Want to Include

Once you know who you are targeting and what they need, you can start looking at the features. The features will attract your customers and keep them coming back for more, but it also dramatically impacts your cost. An app with a few simple features can be built in weeks for a few thousand dollars; a complex app with multiple features can take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Once you know which features are essential to the success of your company, you can start mapping the structure and building an MVP with the right modules and submodules.

Make It User-Friendly

Your app has to be intuitive to use if you are targeting consumers. Apple says their devices are so successful because the average two-year-old can pick up an Apple phone or tablet and start using it without instruction. Most customers won’t have patience with complex tutorials and a steep learning curve, so your app has to be easy to use and logical to succeed. Make sure that you hire designers to ensure that your user interface is simple and your user experience (UX) speaks to customer expectations. Your designer will also provide some advice about the color scheme, fonts, and size of your design elements, so don’t be too prescriptive when you brief your team.

Keep It Safe and Secure

Medical data and privacy is highly sensitive and protected by law. You can’t risk leakage or cyber-attacks, so make sure that your software adheres to all the relevant legal requirements and is in line with best cybersecurity practices. Ask your software development team about their security practices upfront and that they are capable of developing a secure app for you.

Plan for Integration

Medical practitioners and hospitals will likely need access to their legacy systems where important documents and services are kept. Your solutions have to be compatible with these existing services so that the information can be migrated easily to your new system. You can’t really afford downtime or delays when working on solutions that impact the health of patients, so make sure that you have integration strategies in place from the beginning.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to develop healthcare software, you can get started. Do your research and decide which features you need. Make sure that you pick a software development agency with the right experience to secure your software and integrate it with legacy systems. And always, keep improving what you’re doing!