How Low-Code is Leveraged in Healthcare to Reduce Costs

In the modern digital world, it’s become essential for healthcare professionals to offer digital healthcare services to patients. To support a digital healthcare system, a cloud infrastructure must be present.

However, cloud-native architectures are known to be complex and expensive even when a professional team of experts is involved.

Modern software development, including cloud development, has shifted to low-code cloud software development as a suitable alternative to address these concerns.

With low code, cloud software development has become more accessible, making it the best choice for the healthcare sector to opt in to.

Let’s start today’s discussion by looking at why more and more professionals prefer to bring in low code in healthcare.

Why Healthcare Providers Are Turning To Low Code

Traditional software development takes thousands of lines of coding to create a meaningful application that can serve one or more purposes, which can be tedious whether cloud apps or not, application development can consume much time and resources before taking a functional form.

Regarding low code development, the whole approach towards software development changes. Common code development offers a visual system for professional software developers and tech-savvy business users to immediately start.

With pre-coded drag-and-drop components that combine development blocks to create an app, anyone can create a basic application for a certain purpose. They can also utilize reusable components to modernize, scale, and update legacy systems. Fortunately, Impala InTech is the game-changer among healthcare IT solutions companies. We think differently in this case.

Many healthcare organizations have limited staff in the IT department. They opt for low code to attract more citizen developers in the development cycle.

These professionals can contribute their workplace experience and medical knowledge to create an application with low-code tools that meet their requirements.

Also, healthcare IT departments can benefit from a platform that can ease their workload, and low code development is the best option. With a common code in healthcare IT, it’s much easier for the IT department to counter the problems presented by a staff shortage.

What Healthcare Businesses Require In A Low Code Platform

Mendix is the most promising low-code development platform in the current market. Mendix can enable healthcare professionals to create tools that will help them digitize:

• Administration Activities
• Patient Admission
• Patient Experiences
• Patient Records

Here are the top five requirements of healthcare businesses that must be present in a low-code healthcare app and how Mendix can fulfill all the needs.

1. Direct Engagement of Healthcare Professionals

Healthcare businesses require a platform that can allow the collaboration of the IT department and non-technical business department personnel to create a healthcare app that can serve the right purpose.

Mendix enables this with a development approach that utilizes visual modeling, so anyone can participate and contribute.

2. Built-In Cloud Database

Since healthcare apps must be cloud-based, a good low-code platform should offer complete cloud-native solutions with a visual data toolset. This toolset should allow the users to:

• Input Different Data Types
• Design Table Relationships
• Maintain Referential Integrity

Mendix has a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) as a backend that offers unparalleled performance and reliability.

3. Security & Compliance

Mendix has a great track record of security compliance. On top of the enterprise-grade security, Mendix also complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

HIPAA compliance enables healthcare providers to manage protected health information, which makes building a low-code healthcare app with Mendix the perfect choice.

4. Scalable Platforms

Any app that you build on the Mendix low-code platform can be extended using the following:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• SQL
• Rest API

You can customize, expand, and integrate these apps based on your needs. Mendix offers a robust integration capability with various popular and reliable third-party services such as:

• AWS
• Google Drive
• Paypal
• Zapier

5. Easy & Fast Deployment

When building cloud apps, Mendix allows one-click deployment for you to easily upload your healthcare app to a local or hybrid cloud.

It’s much faster to deploy any kind of app you want, whether a simple healthcare portal or a more complex one. The deployment method for Mendix is even simpler than the development method itself.

5 Ways You Can Leverage Low Code In Your Business

There are many different ways to leverage low code in healthcare, but these five are what we think are the most crucial ones.

1. Cloud-Based Patient Portal

Cloud-based patient portals are essential if you want to streamline patient management. With a central data location, You can put a patient’s medical record database, show upcoming doctor’s appointments, and monitor and manage their prescriptions in one place.

2. Online Appointment Facilities

An appointment scheduling software can help improve the patient experience. If you create a standalone online appointment software, to integrate scheduling management in your already existing patient portal, it can enable the patients to set a date for their consultation.

You can also enable SMS or email notification for their scheduled appointment. This can help reduce the amounts of no-shows and appointment cancellations.

3. Vaccination Software

We’ve already left the pandemic behind us, but that doesn’t mean the need for testing and vaccination has vanished permanently. It’s still a vital part of the healthcare industry and a core element that maintains business continuity.

You can create a reminder system that keeps track of various health emergencies, testing, and vaccination schedules so every healthcare individual under your management can be up to date with their remedies and reduce the risk of workplace contamination.

4. Patient Intake Forms

Digitizing the data-gathering process takes human error out of the process and streamlines data management of relevant files for patients and administrative staff.

You can quickly build and deploy a web-based patient intake form with Mendix to transfer data to a physician’s dashboard in real time.

5. Reporting & Analytics Tools

You can easily build analytical dashboards, financial reporting systems, and other data-centric applications with Mendix.

Mendix can help you centralize information from multiple data repositories, reducing the complexity of healthcare data and streamlining critical business processes.

5 Use Cases For Low Code In Healthcare

1. End-to-End Nursing Home Management Portal For Eisentein Flaherty

The Eisenstein Flaherty team is highly experienced in operating nursing homes and needed an online version of their consulting practice. To create a custom-built solution, they took the help of Mendix to build their online consulting platform.

They used the low code platform to digitize their home consulting practices for delivering high-quality care based on 100+ years of combined experience. The Eisenstein Flaherty care provider team joined professional Mendix developers to create EF Ally.

EF Ally is a web-based healthcare solution that provides compliance standardization and operational management services.

2. Centralized Communication Tool For Luz Saúde

AntTail is a Netherlands-based IoT expert for cold-chain logistics for medical supplies. To assure the stability of medicines and vaccines throughout every supply chain, they needed a custom approach to the IoT-based apps. To do so, the AntTail team chose Mendix as their solution.

AntTail leveraged Mendix to build custom applications for medicine-related logistics and AWS to increase data availability for all Mendix applications while maintaining the utmost security and scalability.

With their app, AntTail has established its reputation throughout every aspect of the cold chain, which includes:

• Manufacturing
• Transit
• Warehousing
• Providers to Patient Delivery

AntTail also helped identify and solve a major issue- 90% of patients at home store refrigerated medicine incorrectly.

3. Homecare Planning System For Saga HealthCare

Saga Healthcare is one of the UK’s largest homecare agencies, and they were looking to launch a new homecare scheduling system. With their primary estimation, their budget was an astounding amount of $16 million, and the time estimation was three years.

With Mendix, they finished building their app “SACHA” in just six months, and the final result cost them less than $335,000.

Now you might be thinking, maybe the app isn’t that impressive if it was built that fast and cheap, right? That’s where the surprise lies: SACHA increased their scheduling efficiency 10x after release.

“With a low-code development tool, you can easily build expertise within your IT department, and from there, the power to develop and innovate is in your hands.”

-Matt Smith, Head of IT at Saga Healthcare

4. Analytics Platform For Medical Implants For Kermit PPI

Kermit PPI is a US-based hospital analytics platform to help hospitals digitize transaction and billing management for implantable medical devices.

Like the earlier situation at Saga Healthcare, Kermit PPI’s initial time requirement was a year through traditional development with a team of 10 developers.

Mendix comes in to save the day and allows Kermit PPI to publish the first iteration of their application after nine months with a single developer.

The newly developed app helped Kermit to:

• Analyze Invoices
• Detect expense Reduction Opportunities
• Contracting Issues

With Kermit’s new low-code wonder, hospitals using implants from Kermit Solutions saved about 30% on medical implants.

“Leveraging a low-code environment allowed us to develop our solution very quickly, efficiently, test it, roll it out, and make modifications from customer feedback.”

-Jason Smith, COO and Co-Founder at Kermit PPI

5. Remote Monitoring Platform For Medtronic

Medtronic is a US-based medical device enterprise operating in 150 different countries, and they needed secure remote monitoring tools for triage and tracking their devices and sensors.

Medtronic initially decided to go with off-the-shelf solutions, but they were not customizable enough to fulfill their needs.

Medtronic has reduced its IT expenses by 50% with its current choice of low code platform and can adjust and scale according to customer demand anytime.

“We wanted a secure platform that would allow us to build the capabilities we needed quickly and easily—and we’ve got it.”

-Karel Nouwen, Senior IT Director at Medtronic

Challenges of Working With Low Code In Healthcare

While using low code in healthcare can bring about a revolution for the entire industry, there are certain challenges that healthcare practitioners will have to deal with as well.

1. You Don’t Have Access To The Source of Low-Code Platforms

One of the biggest challenges when working with certain low-code platforms is that you don’t get access to the vendor’s source code, causing you to get stuck in a vendor lock-in.

As a result, migration or changes to the app get very expensive, and the expense increases if it’s a highly complex healthcare app.

2. Security Might Become A Concern

You must integrate multiple modern third-party technologies like apps, tools, and services into the low-code application you have developed.

No matter how secure the low code platform itself is, the security vulnerabilities of these third-party properties can affect the app’s security.

3. You’re Limited By The Features The Platform Offers

You can only work within the limitations of the features provided by the low-code platform you are working with. If you want additional features in your application, you have to integrate them with manual coding.

Transform your Healthcare Business With Impala Intech

Any healthcare can benefit from a robust cloud application that addresses the business’s specific requirements. Limited IT resources for healthcare have made it very challenging to create custom healthcare applications, and leveraging low code is the best way to bridge the gap.

If you’re unwilling to take risks or create an underwhelming application, why not allow our professional Mendix developers at Impala Intech to help you?

You can utilize our team’s expertise on the platform to deliver a seamless experience to your patients and partners with health tech apps.

If you’re interested to know more, contact us today!

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