Telemedicine app development

Telehealth app development: Deep dive into telehealth technology

You should adopt or develop telehealth applications in line with your healthcare facility’s needs. Don’t rush into development merely to keep up with the growing trend (propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic) of adopting telehealth solutions. On the other hand, if you do have a clear vision for how a telehealth software system can benefit your business, you should understand what the telemedicine app development process consists of.

In most cases, a telehealth solution is a multi-component ecosystem that consists of both patient-facing and clinician-facing mobile and/or web applications. A holistic telehealth solution requires a substantial approach to developing a secure software architecture design and choosing the right technologies. We’ll share with you typical architectural approaches and technology options to choose from when beginning the development of a telehealth mobile app or web app. And based on our experience, we’ll also provide you with a few practical tips on successfully implementing telehealth software in your healthcare practice.

How we build a telehealth app architecture

Telecommunications technologies lie at the heart of any telemedicine app development solution that requires real-time videoconferencing between patients and clinicians. We often give preference to ready-made video and audio solutions such as Wowza, Flashphoner, and TokBox, as they save development time and often come with an established basic architecture. These services are also customizable to fit different projects’ needs.

A telemedicine app’s architecture must also account for integrations with other software systems that are present at a certain healthcare facility, such as an electronic health record (EHR) system, hospital information system (HIS), practice management system, and medical imaging system. Proper software interoperability allows your telehealth solution to exchange data with other software solutions and keep everyone in the medical facility regularly updated on the daily workflow. Interoperability is also critical if you need to regularly perform analytics on patient and clinical data and track your business KPIs, such as average time per patient visit.

When working on the architecture of telemedicine app development solutions, we also pay attention to industry-standard security measures, role-based access management, and data storage. These architectural components can differ depending on your requirements, but what’s constant is that we always choose only third-party development services (e.g. cloud vendors) that comply with relevant healthcare laws such as HIPAA as well as any other applicable compliance requirements.

If you want your telehealth system to integrate with medical IoT devices, we also make sure this integration is thought out and reflected in the architectural design. To make the most of this integration, you can include a remote patient monitoring module in your telehealth solution to collect patients’ clinical and fitness data for data-driven diagnostics and treatment management.

Best-fit telehealth technologies

To develop secure and high-performance telehealth products, we’ve accumulated a significant knowledge base and a list of the most suitable technologies. But we also try to keep up with industry trends as well as to enrich this knowledge base and provide up-to-date solutions to a wide range of healthcare businesses globally.

For instance, to enable streamlined videoconferencing functionality and real-time connections, we implement a peer-to-peer network with the WebRTC protocol. For encrypting sensitive user data and passwords, we use the most recent security tools such as the SHA hashing algorithm. We also follow FHIR and HL7 interoperability standards for securely storing, sharing, and retrieving medical data. Our go-to cloud services provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS), as Amazon creates an extremely secure environment for hosting healthcare applications and ensures compliance with healthcare laws.

Before proceeding to telehealth software development, we always validate with our clients the final architectural design of their future telehealth solution as well as the technology stack to keep them actively involved in the decision-making process. Discussing technology choices with business clients isn’t a common practice for the majority of outsourcing software development companies, but at Yalantis, we consider such discussions part of a transparent and trustworthy development process.

Tips for smooth telehealth platform implementation

Once you go through the complete telehealth app development lifecycle with Yalantis, you may face certain challenges with implementing the new solution into your well-established healthcare practice. We’ve prepared a few tips that hopefully will help you streamline the use of your telemedicine platform across all of your healthcare facilities.

• Gather feedback from your clinical staff and conduct patient surveys. This will allow you to identify the issues your employees most frequently face so we can include features in your telehealth software that tackle real people’s daily pain points.

• Discuss your telehealth solution with key stakeholders. Make sure to involve all stakeholders within your healthcare organization in defining the goal behind implementing your telemedicine solution as well as the key features it should include.

• Select critical business KPIs to measure application performance. You should decide how you’ll measure the success of your new telehealth system so that together with other decision-makers at your company you can determine which KPIs are most important when it comes to telemedicine services.

• Identify possible risks. Before investing in telehealth application development, define possible risks that can keep you from achieving your goal within the desired time and budget constraints. Such risks can be of a legal, financial, social, or technological character.

• Set up training for medical staff and clear user onboarding for patients. Implementing new software may lead to frustration and increase anxiety among your employees. Interactive training sessions can help your staff quickly get used to the new workflow, and step-by-step user onboarding can facilitate the use of telehealth solutions among patients.

Telehealth app development involves many components, from defining a compelling implementation strategy to building a reliable telehealth solution with a well-designed architecture and a suitable technology stack that ensures a sufficient level of system security and sufficient protection of sensitive health data. The architecture of a telehealth application is of utmost importance. A proper architecture ensures timely system availability and responsiveness and other critical non-functional requirements for the telehealth platform.

To efficiently manage telemedicine software development and avoid costly re-engineering down the line, you should find a trusted development team with a proven track record in healthcare development that can help you release your telehealth product quickly and with the least possible effort and cost.