This isn’t your grandpa’s health care anymore.
It wasn’t too long ago that managing your health meant an annual checkup with your family doctor and eating an apple a day. But now, when we can monitor our diet, sleep, exercise, symptoms, calories, and practically everything else under the sun via apps and wearables, staying healthy can be stressful. There is almost too much information out there for individuals to manage for themselves and their families. Tech titans are pioneering digital health advancements, like IBM’s Watson Health, which analyzes data from medical records and imaging to find patterns and figure out solutions to patient problems. Along with managing the data for you, technologies like this can drastically cut costs. According to Fortune, patients with rare diseases typically face, on average, seven doctors before a diagnosis is made.
From a software development standpoint, the pace of the health care’s digital transformation is rapid. According to The Economist, “Investment into digital health care has soared. One reason for that is the scale of potential cost-savings.” With 53 percent of consumers saying that their out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits increased year over year, according to Nielsen, giving patients great care for less money is paramount.
Some of the ways we at Providence DIG have already begun to simplify health care and bring it to more people include:
- Offering virtual visits, like Swedish’s ExpressCare Virtual, where patients can interact with a health care provider via video call from their phone, tablet or computer, resulting in less time away from work when you’re trying to figure out a solution to a minor medical problem.
- Using apps like Circle to create more frequent touchpoints between patients and their health care team – so when you have a question, you don’t always have to go in to the doctor’s office.
- Allowing patients to schedule a house call, where a provider comes to their home, like Uber or Lyft for health care.
- Enabling doctors to issue prescriptions and care instructions over Xealth, so you don’t have to spend a lot of valuable time trying to sort out medications or try to remember after the fact what steps you should take next.
- Delivering critical specialty care through telehealth carts, which allow specialist doctors to video conference with colleagues and consult on care for patients in rural areas who may otherwise not have access to specialists.
Some health care tech is better than others
According to Healthcare IT News, currently, there are more than 100,000 health-related apps available to patients. From a development standpoint, choosing what to create that will provide the most benefit to patients can be a challenge, too. “There are so many opportunities for improvement in health care that you could spend your entire life chasing a bunch of small but very valuable ideas that, at full scale, aren’t as valuable as others,” says Aaron Martin, Providence’s chief digital officer and former Amazon exec. “It’s a matter of prioritization.”
At DIG, we only pursue projects that will fundamentally increase the quality, affordability and availability of health care, make clinicians’ and caregivers’ work easier, and eventually help improve the health of a large group of patients. “Today we serve you when you’re sick. Tomorrow we want to partner with you all the time to help improve your health,” says Martin.
Are you a software developer interested in creating better health care tech? If so, check out our job listings.
