How Mobile Apps Development Helps To Improve Healthcare Industry

Patients want healthcare to be more accessible, personalized, and precise — and they expect it to include technology. Digital healthcare mobile apps played a huge role as enablers of better healthcare during this and last year. Let’s see how they have been improving the industry.

24/7 Access To Healthcare

Continuous access to healthcare is something a lot of people have wanted for a long time but couldn’t have, due to different reasons. Some of them couldn’t afford transportation costs, their insurance didn’t cover the specialty services they needed; some of them were unhappy with their assigned physicians or didn’t want to use services that were covered by their insurance. Lots of chronically ill, elderly, and disabled people needed an opportunity to ping their doctors with questions during the day — without visiting the hospital: to figure out ways to manage their symptoms that suddenly appeared, manage their care more efficiently, or just mitigate their anxiety. Digital health provided an opportunity to help all these people.

With telehealth apps that support video conferencing, calls and text chats, patients can either connect to their doctor right at the moment or get assigned to a specialist who is available at almost any time. That’s especially the case for people of color: they don’t trust the industry because of their physicians’ incompetent or blatantly racist conduct, they slowly start using tools created specifically for them by developers and clinicians of color.    

Accessible, virtual healthcare services are tied to a reduction of visits to the ER: people skip visits less and, therefore, there are fewer reasons to call the ambulance. They also — if the healthcare app is science-based and constructed around the patient’s experience — empower people, allowing them to gain more knowledge and awareness on how to manage their conditions, debunking myths about it, and letting them take more control over their well-being.

Availability of Medical Reports

Interoperability between different health systems, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations has been a huge challenge for the industry for a long time. With CMS’ new interoperability rules finalized last year, there is an opportunity for organizations to finally connect and provide patients with constant access to health records from all health institutions they’ve managed their care in. That wouldn’t be possible without patient advocates and digital health initiatives that have been consistently demonstrating how the quality of care, health outcomes, and patient satisfaction improves when people can access their data when they want.

The availability of health data will further grow patient’s understanding of their health, level of health services — because doctors wouldn’t need to endlessly search for all pieces of health history patients have, — and even healthcare costs, without the need for unnecessary re-tests and repeated procedures. Data that is available through patients’ digital devices can even help increase the efficiency of emergency services — if, for instance, the patient is unconscious or non-verbal when the ambulance arrives.

Home Healthcare

Home-based care went up as the pandemic revealed disparities and disruptions in healthcare — in particular, in healthcare infrastructure. With regulations mentioned in the previous paragraph installed over two new benefits that CMS added to Medicare plans (for people with chronic conditions and seniors) aging at home and services associated with it has started getting more attention.

Digital solutions for home-based healthcare vary. It’s the coalition of Amazon Care, Ascension, and Intermountain Healthcare organized to expand their telemedicine, remote monitoring, and data sharing offerings. It’s fall detection software. It’s services that connect the elderly to caretakers who can help them get to a hospital or simply talk to them (and help battle loneliness) to full-fledged end-to-end services offering, for instance, a recovery team that helps them with cardiac rehabilitation.

With developers creating mobile interfaces seniors can easily understand — and with digital health becoming more accessible and affordable in general, home care — a blend of patient-oriented care services, continuous monitoring, and technology — becomes a tool that might help avoid lots of preventable injuries, worsening in seniors’ conditions, and senior wellness as a whole.

Easy Payments

In 2021, with hospitals obligated to break down healthcare costs in a way that is understandable for users with new regulations that aim to push cost transparency — patients are less and less confused about what they are paying for (or why they are paying so much.). Apart from that, next-generation payers in healthcare — like Clover Health, Iora Health, and Oscar Health — give their patients affordable, personalized health plans that are tied to patients’ specific healthcare needs.

Also, young providers — technology-enabled new clinics, telehealth startups, and so on — often offer affordable non-insurance options for patients, which is advantageous for the unemployed (as most people in America get their insurance from employers). People can simply pay for their, e.g. therapy visit via PayPass — it’s an incredible step forward from legacy payment systems traditional for the industry.

Health Monitoring On Distance

Despite the fact large tech players who develop wearables are under extreme scrutiny right now, FitBit and Apple Watch are still very popular. Using these and other wearable APIs, developers build solutions that help patients and doctors monitor patient health. With it, patients can better understand the dynamics of their conditions, the way different factors impact their health, see trends and tendencies of their sleeping habits, physical activities, or other health biomarkers — and address them. Or, with wearables that are specifically designed to monitor glucose levels in the blood, doctors can notice anomalies in the health of patients with diabetes and address them before they’ve resulted in something bad.

Of course, sensors on wearables are still aren’t perfect, clinical studies that demonstrate their efficiency often underrepresent BIPOC, and public privacy concerns are absolutely valid. Wearables have a long way to go in terms of integration into the care continuum as a tool of precise health monitoring — but they do move closer to that point.

Finishing Thoughts

In 2021, it’s fair to say that digital healthcare is a new norm, and mobile apps play a huge role in that. Hopefully, the future will bring more research-based mobile applications for the healthcare industry, and startup founders in the industry will be able to show that remote on-demand care deserves attention and is valuable not only when it’s the only option — like it’s been in lockdowns.