5 Key Ingredients of the Modern Healthcare Services

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The consumers of services have become more demanding in this era of the connected world. Technology has bridged gaps between the service provider and consumer, and sometimes accessing a service is as easy as clicking a button in the app. The Healthcare industry is no exception!

There was a time when a few healthcare service providers enjoyed a monopoly. But with the increasing competition, the healthcare industry has become more consumer-centric and healthcare businesses are putting extra efforts to offer convenient and satisfying experience to the patients and not just the usual human care that is expected by default from any service provider.

Let us understand the key ingredient of modern healthcare services and the technologies they are based on.

1. Remote monitoring with IoT
With the availability of cheap internet-connected devices & internet plans, the remote monitoring of the patients can soon become a mainstream service offered by healthcare service providers. The data collected from the connected devices having biometric sensors is stored in the cloud and is then used to develop Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems that have a detailed history of patient’s treatments/prescriptions, diseases diagnosed, vital signs, body measures, etc. They can help in predicting and may even prevent future ill medical conditions.

Remote patient monitoring is beneficial both for the patient as well as for healthcare service providers. It enables a healthcare business to service comparatively more patients since they are not restricted by the physical capacity of the hospital/clinic.

2. Mobile Apps for booking appointments and video conferencing
Mobile apps are being used extensively by other businesses, be it for booking a restaurant, hiring a cab, ordering food, shopping for trendy clothes, and whatnot. Healthcare service providers too have joined the race and are offering apps for tracking diet, manage exercise schedules, and even booking appointments with consultants.

A scalable and robust application built on superior architecture principles can enable the healthcare service provider to offer services like Telemedicine through voice/video/text chat.

3. Practice Management System built on the latest Web technologies
Healthcare business involves a lot of operational work and management of people as well as resources. To offer competitive services, a modern-day healthcare service provider needs to ensure that the patients have a seamless experience from the time they step in the facility till the time they are billed for the services they have consumed. For this, a practice management system is essential!

It helps in capturing patient’s demographics and perform other complex tasks such as managing appointments, maintaining lists of the insurance providers and managing claims, process billing, and generate reports.

4. Blockchain-based Electronic Health Records (EHR) Systems
As discussed above, EHR is used for recording the patient’s medical history. EHR systems hold importance since digital information is easy to transmit and can be stored more securely compared to the information stored in physical format. Since the privacy of the patients’ data and security of general medical data such as generated from healthcare surveys and clinical trials have become a topmost priority of the modern healthcare systems, having EHR systems that enable you to achieve HIPAA compliance can help in differentiating your brand from others.

Since Blockchain is an immutable distributed record system, it is the best for building EHR systems. Blockchain-based EHR systems are more auditable and any changes/transactions can be easily traced.

5. A.I. based Virtual Health Assistant
It is an age-old phenomenon that the patients often miss appointments or forget to take medicine on time. This is more prominent in today’s busy and hectic lifestyle. A modern-day healthcare service provider can offer a virtual health assistant that can do all of this for the patient in an engaging way, much better than the reminder apps. It can monitor the patient’s condition and ensure the patient takes medicine on time or miss any appointments.

Utilizing machine learning and A.I. algorithms, virtual health assistants can provide critical support to patients. A healthcare service provider offering such a service can surely create a loyal base of patients.

Conclusion
Consumers of today demand more; healthcare service providers can no longer offer only the traditional medical service. They need to innovate and utilize technology to serve their customers better and fulfill their evolving needs.

It is high time you roll out the above-mentioned services quickly. We, at Unthinkable, can help you design scalable, robust, and extensible solutions at 2x speed. To know more, reach out to us here.

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