Boost Patient Engagement: Why Hospitals Need Mobile Apps Now

Quick Summary :- Starting from managing the bill payments to tracking the patients' medical records, healthcare applications are playing a major role in establishing proper coordination between different departments of the hospitals. Here, we have discussed eight such reasons why hospitals need to develop a mobile app for their betterment.

With the advancements in technology, the need to have an application is increasing for almost every industry, starting from education to retail. However, recently, it is the healthcare industry where the demand to have an application has escalated by ten folds. Here we explain why need to build a mobile app for Hospital?

No matter how big a hospital is or in which particular medical genre it’s providing the services, having an app will help the business to conduct all the functionalities much faster and in a swifter manner.

According to a 2019 report, the global healthcare industry dealing with digital platforms had a net worth of around 106 billion USD.

With such a growth rate expected for the future, it has become mandatory for almost all hospitals and other healthcare facilities to launch a digital interface or develop a mobile app for their services.

To make the situation clearer and more transparent, the following article will talk about the major advantages of application development for a hospital business & importance of mobile app for hospital.

Better Communication Between Health Experts and Patients

One of the main challenges that the hospitals faced was establishing proper communication between the heath experts and the patients. Be it due to the lack of resources in the hospital or mismatch of appointment scheduling, several patients had been deprived of proper diagnosis since there was no proper way of communicating with the health experts.

That’s the reason why mobile app development has become imminent for the hospitals.

BENEFITS:

• With a properly designed app, a patient can easily communicate with the doctor and vice-versa.
• Different doctors can also communicate amongst themselves in case two or more experts are handling a serious patient at a time.
• With no miscommunication, patients can now get the best diagnosis that they deserve.

Also Read : All You Need to Know About How to Patent An App Idea (Complete Guide)

Ideal For Hospitals Providing Services to Remote Areas

When it comes to remote areas, hospitals are trying hard to provide their services properly. However, they are facing many hindrances, like not being able to dispatch proper healthcare teams to the remote areas or the patients not finding proper transports to reach the healthcare centers in the urban areas.

A report published by NCBI and highlighted by PubMed Central in stated that about 56% of the total global rural population lacks health coverage. This indicates a significant disparity in access to healthcare between rural and urban areas.

This is where mobile app development comes into the play. As most people are using smartphones, even in the rural areas, they can easily book appointments, consult with the doctors, or even book special transports for both non-emergency and emergency cases.

Easy appointment scheduling and cancelling

Another major challenge which most hospitals face even in this 21st century is in appointment scheduling. They maintain the age-old logbooks for noting down the patient names and details against each doctor’s names and also assign the times accordingly.

Such manual maintenance of appointment logs can introduce discrepancies in the work, which is why many patients have faced problems with their bookings. Either they fail to get a proper slot or have to wait for a long time to get their appointment confirmed.

That’s why hospitals are nowadays looking to integrate automated appointment scheduling software into their business.

BENEFITS:

• Such platforms allow the management team to easily prepare slots for every doctor working in the hospital and assign the empty slots to the patients.
• Appointment booking and scheduling can be done easily and also with great speed.
• The hospital management team can easily cancel the appointments due to any circumstance.
• One can quickly adjust a slot for any other patient on stand-by without having to deal with any manual labor.

Proper Resource and Inventory Management

Regardless of the hospital size, every healthcare center is equipped with huge inventory stocks, starting with the medicines to surgical equipment and so on. In earlier days, the hospital management teams used to track the stocks and their usage manually, which made it really difficult for them to accurately maintain the inventory.

In fact, resource management also proved to be a challenge for the hospitals. Not only did it put a huge effect on the inventory stocks but also increased the unnecessary costs.

However, with the introduction of healthcare inventory and resource management applications, it has become possible for the hospitals to:

• Manage and track every shipment
• Keep records of medical and surgical stocks
• Manage resource dispatch to various departments of the hospital

According to article, hospitals utilizing inventory management software can reduce their inventory holding costs by 20% to 40% through improved stock levels and reduced waste. 

Integration of IoT with the Healthcare Industry

As per a report generated in 2020, the total worth of IoT in the healthcare industry was 72.5 million USD, which is expected to grow tenfold in the coming years. IoT or Internet of Things has made it possible for the hospitals to connect their systems over a single network through the internet.

Be it in the form of the wearables tracking the health parameters or the doctor’s computers connected with the in-hospital radiology rooms, IoT is revolutionizing the healthcare industry, albeit towards the betterment.

Also Read: Reasons To Choose IoT For Mobile App Development

It has now become possible for the hospitals to see the patient records or relay information from one floor to another just by a click of button, all thanks to the Internet of Things technology.

Better Self-monitoring of Health

Another area where application development has played a crucial role in the healthcare industry is in self-health monitoring.

BENEFITS:

• With wearable devices that can be connected to smartphones, patients can now record their heartbeat, body temperature, and other such parameters.
• Several hospitals have also launched special applications where their pregnant patients can track the development of their pregnancies and update the doctors accordingly.
• Similarly, several hospitals have launched apps for babies and toddlers so that the parents can track their developments. These records are accessible by the concerned field doctors, which make diagnosis easy.

As an application is always connected with a database, these records get stored which finally helps the hospitals to work on the patient details easily without having to search for physical records which can be easily misplaced.

Easy Access to Patient Logs and Case Histories

In earlier days, every case history of the patients was stored in physical files in forms of prescriptions, reports, X-ray plates, MRI plates, and so on. These documents are bunched together and then stored in the hospital’s file room.

However, such an arrangement proved to be disastrous for the hospitals because the physical documents can get misplaced easily. Also, the file rooms have a certain storage capacity which is why not many files could be stored.

To overcome this problem, hospitals have integrated database software tools within their business. Two types of database application are there: on-site database and the cloud database.
• With the on-site database, the hospital will have sole control over the data but such applications come with limited space and the data can’t be accessed for remote locations.
• When the cloud database applications are considered, doctors can easily open case history as the cloud network can be accessed from any location outside the hospital.

Secured Bill Payments

With the integration of applications with the hospital systems, it has become possible for the accounts team to keep a proper track of all the payments made by the patient families.

Starting from purchase of medicines from the hospital medical shops to the bill payments, every single transaction can be tracked through the apps.

Also, these online digital payment gateways are highly secured and have multiple levels of authentication which is why there is no fear of the details getting hacked or payments going into wrong accounts.

These payment gateways have also made it easier for the accounts department to dispatch the payrolls of the healthcare staff, doctors, nurses, management team, and other employees working in the organization. This is one of the strongest reasons why hospitals should look to develop a mobile app.

Harikrishna Kundariya

CEO, eSparkBiz

Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, chatbot and blockchain savvy, designer, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz @Software Development Company where you can Hire Software Developers. His 15+ experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on Web app development.