Posted in:

Identifying Your Needs: The First Steps to Building Custom Healthcare Software

You must be familiar with the domino effect, where the fall of one piece leads to another and slowly the fall of the entire structure. While its reference is relevant to explain why small things matter, given the higher dependence and connectivity of the healthcare industry, its relevance is even more evident than ever before.

As the trend of custom healthcare software is on the rise, the most crucial aspect of development is that healthcare professionals often ignore it, causing the domino effect of their venture. What most healthcare professionals begin with is finding healthcare IT solutions that help them improve their care services. However, the lack of technical understanding of how to build custom healthcare software finds them in the mix.

Riding on the tides of the custom software development trend, how can healthcare providers identify healthcare software needs for their clinic?

Well, let this blog be your guide to understanding your needs and get a kick start to ideal healthcare software development.

So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Understanding Your Current Workflow

It is crucial to understand in adopting any form of care delivery that care can only be delivered when it passes through a certain workflow. That is the reason why analyzing your existing processes and improvising them with respect to your digital healthcare delivery is something that gives you a head start in software development for healthcare.

First thing to decide on is to map out the entire journey of the patient while receiving care. For instance, the first step in this includes patient intake where the patient is enrolled or admitted to the clinic. Then comes appointment scheduling where the patient books their appointment with the provider to receive care. Then comes the billing and claims process.

All these processes mentioned above need to be addressed by the custom healthcare software. Along with this, one of the major healthcare software requirements involves data management processes where you decide how the data flows in your custom healthcare software and your digital practice as well. 

Some of the few things that you need to identify and address are bottlenecks, delays, and the care areas that are prone to errors. One of the best practices to identify and address these healthcare software needs is to collect feedback from the staff and the challenges they face in their day-to-day activities.

Being in a virtual ecosystem of care delivery important pointers such as appointment scheduling, wait times and communication goals must be considered. This will elevate the patient experience and help both the parties in building a collaborative relationship with each other.

Pinpointing Your Areas for Improvement

Once you have identified, understood and made the necessary amendments to your clinical workflow, it is time for you to identify the potential gaps in your workflow where the custom healthcare software can be useful to make a difference.

To give you a headstart in pinpointing the areas for improvement, here are some that you should consider in your healthcare software development:

  • Streamlining Administrative Tasks: Most of the tasks in healthcare administration are repetitive and usually take up almost 34% of the healthcare providers’ time. Here, you need to identify which tasks the custom healthcare software can automate. For instance, tasks like appointment scheduling, referral processing, and insurance verification can be automated, which gives your healthcare providers enough time to focus on care delivery rather than on manual administrative procedures.
  • Enhancing Patient Care: The next focus after administration should be patient care. Here, communication is extremely important, whether it be one-way or two-way. Some of the gaps that can be filled with custom healthcare software are appointment reminders, telehealth options, and secure messaging features. This will not only foster a holistic ecosystem with patient care in focus but also give patients an elevated patient experience.
  • Boosting Data Management: Since all your healthcare software needs will be dealt with data, your custom healthcare software must be capable of boosting data management. For instance, it should streamline data collection for patients and the organization while having the reporting feature to optimize the operations, which can enhance the quality of care being provided to the patients.
  • Future Proof Options: It is natural for practices to grow with time, which will attract many patients, and that will change the healthcare software requirements with new technologies. For this, you need to choose the technology stack for your custom healthcare software carefully, allowing it to expand its wings whenever the practice needs to scale.

Prioritizing Your Needs

It is obvious that healthcare software development needs a budget, and a small-scale healthcare clinic cannot meet all its requirements in one go. However, this shouldn’t be a problem for your custom healthcare software. Since the most crucial part of healthcare software is its features, you can choose which features to develop based on the impact, feasibility, and budget. 

But how do you prioritize which features to move ahead with? Well, here are some of the insights that can help you in deciding which custom healthcare software features you should consider when you’re under budget constraints.

Features that you should prioritize are those that help in improving patient care and your staff efficiency and help you save money. Some of the features include appointment scheduling, telehealth features, secure messaging, patient portal, billing, etc. These are some of the generic features, but they can vary depending on your specialty type, etc.

Having said that, you should also consider the complexity and cost of development of each feature, since it can quickly run your treasury dry, leaving you with an incomplete custom healthcare software, which will technically be of little to no use.

Setting Realistic Goals

Healthcare IT solutions are complex, and it takes time to develop the final product. While some of the healthcare IT companies commit to developing custom healthcare software at a very high speed, you need to be realistic and set achievable goals. The best way to get an idea of the entire custom software development cycle is to create a timeline for development.

While setting the goals, clearly define success metrics for your custom healthcare software. These metrics can vary from reduced appointment wait time to improved patient satisfaction scores. For instance, after the implementation of the custom healthcare software, the software should reduce the waiting time for booking appointments and also help both healthcare providers and patients to know how much wait time is available before moving ahead with the appointment.

Having said that, you can also break down the development process into achievable milestones, and you will get an idea of when the final product will be ready. Once you have decided on the development milestones with your IT team and healthcare providers, you can consider a phased approach, where you first implement the core functionalities and add the features later to build custom healthcare software that ideally fits your requirements.

Building a Strong Foundation for Success

Software development for healthcare can literally change the way your healthcare practice works, that is why identifying your needs before and enhancing it is the groundwork you need to build a strong foundation for success.

To build a strong foundation, it is important for you to correctly identify healthcare software needs. Furthermore, once you have finalized this, you need to document your requirements clearly and concisely to communicate effectively with your stakeholders and developers. 

The next step in this is to form a team of stakeholders from your practice that provides you with valuable inputs throughout the development process. This is important to identify the gaps in the software which needs to be addressed before the software is deployed for regular use.

Last but not least, it is important for you to choose a reputable software development company which holds an expertise in developing healthcare IT solutions. To give you a head start, you can choose Thinkitive Technologies who have a staggering 9+ years of experience in healthcare software development. 

Conclusion

Identifying your needs beforehand is extremely important in custom healthcare software development. A well-defined roadmap to healthcare IT solutions development can help you build the ideal custom healthcare software that will not only enhance your patient care and streamline your administration process but also help your practice save significant amounts of time and money. On top of that, it can also be your source of generating additional revenue, but how? Well, that’s a topic for another guiding blog. Until then, click here to get started with your custom healthcare software development process.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • What are the benefits of custom healthcare software compared to generic solutions?

Custom healthcare software offers several advantages over generic solutions:

  • Tailored workflows: It caters to the specific needs and processes of your facility, unlike a one-size-fits-all approach.
  • Seamless integration: It integrates smoothly with existing systems, reducing data silos and improving information flow.
  • Enhanced accuracy: It can be designed to minimize errors in data entry and reporting, leading to better decision-making.
  • How do I determine the budget for my custom software project?

Here’s a basic outline to estimate your custom software project budget:

  • Consider complexity (high = more expensive)
  • Estimate team size (more developers = more cost)
  • Choose a development method (agile is typically cheaper)
  • Timeline (faster = potentially more expensive)
  • Tooling and infrastructure needs (add extra costs)

This gives a rough idea. Refine your requirements and get quotes for a more accurate budget.

  • What is the typical timeline for developing custom healthcare software?

he typical timeline for developing custom healthcare software can vary widely depending on complexity, but generally falls between 6-24 months.

  • How can I ensure the security and compliance of my custom software?

Here are some key practices to ensure the security and compliance of your custom software:

  • Security: Employ secure coding practices, conduct regular penetration testing, encrypt sensitive data, and implement strong access controls.
  • Compliance: Identify relevant regulations, design your software with compliance in mind, and conduct regular audits.
  • What is the role of stakeholders in the software development process?

Stakeholders in software development are individuals or groups impacted by the software. They provide requirements, funding, and feedback, ensuring the software meets their needs.

In short, stakeholders play a crucial role in the success of a software development project by providing input, funding, and feedback throughout the process.