In the wake of the pandemic, many healthcare platforms were left stranded on outdated legacy systems due to a lack of compatibility with new technologies.
At the same time, digital transformation accelerated dramatically during lockdown.
Fast, robust, and easy to adopt, low-code development platforms emerged as an excellent option for modernizing outdated healthcare systems.
It’s no surprise that a Forrester survey of larger enterprises already showed low-code in use by 31% of the 254 IT decision-makers interviewed.
Gartner, meanwhile, predicts that by 2025, 70% of applications will be built with low-code or no-code.
Those numbers include healthcare leaders, who see the power of these technologies to simplify the development and maintenance of their platforms.
In this blog post, we’ll explain the benefits of low-code in healthcare and how organizations have been boosting productivity by building low-code solutions. Read on!
Why Healthcare Needs Low-Code for Application Development
When the pandemic and the Covid-19 crisis hit, healthcare found itself at an impasse: how do you optimize patient care while doing everything possible to keep the coronavirus from spreading?
The answer had been debated in medical circles for some time, but suddenly needed to be fast-tracked: digital transformation through telemedicine.
The focus on digital transformation in healthcare reinforced the importance of remote care, which had previously been seen merely as a way to streamline appointments and shorten hospital queues.
It quickly became a necessary measure to strengthen care and prevent the spread of an unknown disease, supporting social distancing.
Regulating telemedicine then became a priority. This context is what drove healthcare’s need for solutions that could be developed and deployed fast.
In other words, an approach very different from standard practice up to that point.
Low-code had the ideal conditions for expansion. Its speed and flexibility make it well suited to building digital applications that mediate communication, monitoring, and treatment between doctors and patients.
Applications and systems were urgently needed and had to go live within weeks, meeting rapidly growing demand.
Speed in developing solutions for healthcare innovation is in ever-greater demand — to the point of becoming practically an obligation.
And low-code is a technology that can successfully meet the demands of telemedicine and the broader needs of hospitals, clinics, laboratories, and other institutions in the sector.
Benefits of Low-Code in Healthcare
Healthcare organizations can leverage low-code to strengthen their digital transformation journey, adopting fast, practical, and efficient strategies for building solutions.
As a result, these applications improve internal processes and the work of care teams.
With that in mind, here are the main advantages of low-code for the medical field.
Involving Healthcare Professionals in Low-Code Development
In a movement where people from all kinds of backgrounds are converging with technology, different business areas begin working together on a platform that is quick to learn and easy to adapt to.
That’s because low-code platforms are business-oriented, opening the door for doctors, nurses, technicians, and other healthcare professionals to take part in building solutions.
This is especially valuable in healthcare, since these professionals can steer functionality toward their specific needs.
Faster Low-Code Development and Intuitive Features
It’s precisely the ease of working with low-code that enables rapid application development, since it reduces the effort required to build.
These platforms provide reusable components and pre-built templates, letting teams work with building blocks.
The technology is intuitive, flexible, and adaptable — even allowing new features to be tested while professionals are using the solutions, without interrupting ongoing operations.
Low-code also makes it easy to integrate ready-made APIs into systems, shortening delivery time.
Scalable Architectures with Low-Code
A healthcare organization employs many professionals, some of whom provide services on an occasional basis.
Factor in the number of patients who might use an application, and the user count can grow beyond measure.
With a low-code platform, the organization doesn’t need to worry about available data storage capacity: everything lives in the cloud.
Cloud infrastructure providers such as AWS offer native support that makes tools easy to scale, so provisioning resources on demand becomes far more practical.
Easy Integration with Third-Party Software and Legacy Systems
Many healthcare organizations still rely on aging, outdated legacy systems. Low-code, however, makes it possible to bring innovation to those platforms by integrating new features and modules.
A key example is adding telemedicine, which has grown enormously since the pandemic.
Today, it has become essential for hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare businesses to be able to serve their patients online.
That’s why updating systems to enable this capability should be a priority — including remote access from mobile devices.
Easier Shift Operations Management with Low-Code in Healthcare
Digital transformation is also fundamental to the internal processes of teams working shifts.
Integrating low-code platforms can help medical teams communicate better during their shifts.
With a streamlined tool, staff can report incidents and patient needs, track the lifecycle of events, and log other information in a far more practical way.
With a single management and control tool accessible to every professional, work becomes more agile and efficient.
After all, information is centralized in one unified environment for collaboration.
Appointment Scheduling and Care Shifts
Another process that gets a boost from tools built with low-code in healthcare is appointment scheduling.
Applications can be used to improve the patient experience when booking appointment slots.
At the same time, physicians’ shifts can be managed, giving administrators greater visibility to match doctors’ and patients’ schedules.
As you can see, low-code in healthcare has a great deal to offer organizations in the sector.
Beyond being an easy-to-use technology, it allows doctors and other healthcare professionals to take part in building applications.
Even without prior development experience, they can support the IT team — without sidestepping IT governance, thanks to the permissions defined in the platform.
In this way, healthcare finds in the platform an important ally for digital transformation — delivered in less time, with financial savings and a leaner team.
Want to learn more about the platform? Visit the TrueChange website!
