The Trends Increasing Demand for Mobile App Development in The Healthcare Industry
If just two decades ago, you had told healthcare professionals that there will come a day that they will do a lot of their work via mobile devices, most of them would have laughed at you. Understandably so, the healthcare industry is not the most welcoming to new ideas and ways of doing things. Indeed, it would be placed in the same category with the financial sector which is always extremely suspicious and even more reluctant to embrace innovation.
All the same, the last few years has seen an unprecedented rise in the use of mobile devices in the medical world. More than any other time in the past, today mobile phones are being used to transmit data, including critical healthcare information. As a result, healthcare industry leaders are evaluating and considering the benefits of custom application development to take advantage of the opportunities that mobile devices have made available to the industry.
Today, mobile applications can track a patient’s state of wellbeing and send a notification to his physician when something doesn’t go as it is supposed to. Additionally, these apps collect information that doctors can use to offer better healthcare to their patients. This data includes a patient’s medical history as well as the medical history of other family members, especially his parents.
All this can be done in real time, essentially making it possible for doctors to make faster and more informed decisions on how to treat their patients. As you can see, mobile apps are proving to be quite useful in the healthcare industry. Let us, therefore, examine the key trends that are driving the uptake and increasing demand for these apps in the healthcare sector.
Electronic Medical Records
Electronic medical records (EMRs) have become the centerpiece of the healthcare industry. Instead of saving medical records on paper, EMRs make it possible to do so electronically, making it easy for the information to be made available over the internet.
Ask any doctor, and they will tell you that one of the most frustrating thing when trying to find the right treatment for a patient is lack of proper medical records of past years. Without a clear understanding of a patient’s medical history, a doctor can give the wrong diagnosis and treatment. Electronic medical records, which can be viewed via mobile apps, solve this problem.
E-visits
Increasingly, e-visits are replacing many in-office appointments for many patients. An e-visit refers to an electronic interaction between a physician/doctor and a patient. It can be through email, video conferencing, or even text. The rise in the popularity of these electronic visits is reducing costs and saving time. While there are certain in-office appointments that e-visits cannot replace other meetings for things like medicine change and prescription renewal can be effectively held electronically. Now, new mobile apps are emerging to simplify and streamline these e-visits.