Health Technology, Digital Healthcare
Article | September 8, 2023
COVID-19 has practically given a metaphorical high-voltage jolt to the whole world. It fell like a plague and affected humans in a way that nothing else has since the last global war. In short, it has reminded us of our mortality. As a result, improvement has become the new goal for the wise.
According to Jana Abelovska, Head Pharmacist atClick Pharmacy, “COVID-19 has put the world on notice, especially the healthcare sector. Everything and everyone has seen its effects. But in this turmoil also come opportunities – an opportunity to grow and be better. It is a time of progress to help create a better and healthier tomorrow.”
Read More
Health Technology, Digital Healthcare
Article | August 16, 2023
The criteria of patient satisfaction have changed dramatically. The priority of your healthcare business is to provide patients the right treatment. But nowadays, you cannot excel in your service and win the hearts of the patients just by providing the right treatment. You will also have to focus on delivering a great patient experience. Thus, a comprehensive healthcare marketing strategy should be designed accordingly.
In this digital age, along with their healthcare requirements, people are already overwhelmed with all the necessary information they need regarding their work and life-related issues. This has turned them into customers, rather than just being patients. And has led them to want and expect more. According to a study done by McKinsey, people expect from healthcare companies the same way they expect from other non-healthcare companies. Your patients now expect:
• Your deliverance on their expectations
• Great customer service
• Great value
• To make their life easier with the service they get from you
They look for whether your healthcare services provide these benefits through online resources. A Kantar Health Report says that around 60% of millennials depend upon online information as the best resource for healthcare information. They also consider word-of-mouth referrals trustful. This makes it vital for you to put in place the right digital healthcare marketing strategies. It is necessary to avoid your prospects going to your competitors whenever they search for effective medical services online.
The need for a robust Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Creating an effective healthcare marketing strategy is part of the inbound marketing process. The strategy can include and utilize all the resources to bring in opportunities. The resources also can confront the threats that come your way to hinder your healthcare business. The resources can be in any form of original content such as articles, blog posts, podcasts, interviews on medical topics, informational videos, e-books, case studies, press releases, white papers, etc. These resources deal with threats and opportunities that are concerned with persuading prospects to come to you.
Healthcare marketing strategy is a vision statement. It lays down the healthcare marketing plan in detail for some time. It should include objectives and plans for exceeding the current performance of your particular healthcare business. It should talk about competition analysis, target marketing, budgets, marketing tactics, and SWOT analysis, which are essential elements of an effective healthcare marketing strategy. Having the right healthcare marketing strategy in place will help you increase patient inflow and lower your marketing budget, which increases your return on investment (ROI).
Benefits of Having an Effective Healthcare Marketing Strategy
The right healthcare marketing strategy focuses on two main things; bringing in more patients to your hospital or clinic and maximizing your ROI. ROI can be maximized by minimizing expenses on both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. It is called ROI based marketing plan or strategy.
There are many benefits to having an effective healthcare marketing strategy in place for your medical practices. They include anticipating and assessing threats and opportunities, prepare to make a road map to counter the threats in time effectively, and find out creative ways to enhance your outcome. Below are some of the other benefits of having a healthcare marketing strategy:
Goals and Objectives
A sound healthcare marketing strategy, as discussed earlier, helps you to understand what you are going to achieve in a scheduled time frame. This keeps you focused on your goals without getting diverted. Moreover, it provides you a clear picture of your business's growth and makes you aware of how far you can go with your business in the target market.
Operating Budgets
Healthcare marketing strategy helps you create a detailed operation budget in advance for your business. By knowing your expected future costs, expenses, and forecasted income over the year, you can make better plans for all the expected and unexpected challenges of your business.
Service Line Decisions
When you compare your result with your expected results, you will understand where it worked well and the areas you need to improve. By knowing the areas in which you failed, you can improve them and yield better results on the next run by improving your line of services.
Risk Management
In business, risk management includes forecasting and evaluating the financial risks and identifying solutions to minimize or eliminate their impact. A clear healthcare marketing strategy in place allows you to manage these aspects of your healthcare business efficiently.
Capital Planning
A marketing strategy provides you a clear idea of how to process your budgeting resources for your organization's future. It is possible with both short-term and long-term plans.
Developing an effective healthcare marketing strategy
Creating goals and defining objectives or benefits that you intend to achieve is the first step to the creation of a healthcare brand strategy. Once all these things are set, you may assess all the required and available resources. Then devise a final strategy on when and how to fulfill these goals.
Healthcare digital marketing is unique as it is the most cost-effective way to reach out to your most relevant prospect at the right time. It ensures thatyou reach your patients in the time of their need. Here is a step-by-step healthcare marketing strategy for you. It is designed keeping in mind all the aspects of your healthcare business, including your competitors and prospective patients.
Establish Your Target Customers
The first step starts with identifying the most relevant target market for you. A comprehensive online and offline research would help you with it. The research can be based on demographic, geographic, behavioral, and psychographic information.
Then concentrate on all the marketing resources you have, in order to attract relevant customers. Clarity about your target audience ensures you create the right content for the right people. It also adds to the efficiency and effectiveness of your digital healthcare strategy.
Study Your Competition
Your competitors also target the same audience. So, identify competitive influences and issues to have a proactive strategy and plan. It helps you stay ahead of your competition with your healthcare marketing strategy. Use internet, TV and Radio commercials, referrals, data analysis, billboards, or other media to research your competition.
Internal and External Evaluation
To evaluate your external and internal environment, conduct a SWOT analysis of your healthcare business. Thorough knowledge of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats will make you determine how to use your resources for better results effectively.
Decide Your Long-term and Short-term Goals
Most businesses conceive their marketing plans and strategies for a year. However, the best healthcare marketing strategy is the one, which is aligned with both the long-term and short-term goals of your brand. Evaluating, prioritizing, and organizing various combinations of specific marketing tactics and strategies will suit you the best in pursuing your business goals.
Plan Your Marketing Budget
Protecting and generating sources of revenue is generally a significant concern in marketing. Creating a task budget and clear objectives to work towards realizing the exact goals and outcomes you expect from your business is very important. For this, you may have to specify your measurable and quantifiable goals. Define your marketing tactics and strategies, including advertising, brand development and enhancement, networking and public relations, etc.
You also have to evaluate profitability, launching plan, and marketing plan. Moreover, monitor and track closely to adjust tactics and strategies necessary for achieving, maintaining, or exceeding your expected profit level.
The best part of having an effective healthcare marketing strategy in place is that it makes you focus your energy and time on improving your healthcare practice. The digital marketing team will work according to the strategy for realizing both your long-term and short-term goals.
Doing all of it alone may be challenging. We, at Media 7, help healthcare companies, especially healthcare technology providers, with healthcare marketing strategies, which are proactive and profit-oriented. We help you attract prospects, convert them, and make them your customers. To know more about us, visit the Media 7 website.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are marketing strategies for health tech marketers?
Health tech marketers can effectively use many marketing strategies, including engaging customers in social media platforms, video marketing, creating content for niche communities, email marketing, paid media advertising, event marketing, and content marketing.
What are the tips for creating the strategy for health tech marketing?
Updating your organization’s mission, vision, and values, conducting a business and operational analysis, developing strategic options, selecting strategic growth objectives, developing the strategy execution plan can be included in your health tech marketing strategy.
What are the best social marketing strategies for health tech?
Start using chatbots, create a personalized experience for your customers, create an efficient content marketing strategy, create a community for your audience, and create profiles on the relevant channels that can be the best social media strategies for health tech companies.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "FAQPage",
"mainEntity": [{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What are marketing strategies for health tech marketers?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Health tech marketers can effectively use many marketing strategies, including engaging customers in social media platforms, video marketing, creating content for niche communities, email marketing, paid media advertising, event marketing, and content marketing."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What are the tips for creating the strategy for health tech marketing?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Updating your organization’s mission, vision, and values, conducting a business and operational analysis, developing strategic options, selecting strategic growth objectives, developing the strategy execution plan can be included in your health tech marketing strategy."
}
},{
"@type": "Question",
"name": "What are the best social marketing strategies for health tech?",
"acceptedAnswer": {
"@type": "Answer",
"text": "Start using chatbots, create a personalized experience for your customers, create an efficient content marketing strategy, create a community for your audience, and create profiles on the relevant channels that can be the best social media strategies for health tech companies."
}
}]
}
Read More
Health Technology, AI
Article | July 18, 2023
The world is moving towards digitalization in every domain. And now COVID-19 has imposed a need for remote work and communication environments. In that case, healthcare organizations have started utilizing medical software with cutting-edge technologies that could offer mobile health solutions. And they could cater to such needs through a healthcare software development company.
Therefore, the medical institutions must opt for the right healthcare software vendor that is familiar with the new trends in the healthcare sector. Such companies can help optimize digital patient care through health care application development.
Importance of healthcare software development company Or why you need one?
Healthcare software development companies process applications to store, retrieve, and share user data. They are connected globally through cloud services. Partnering with a healthcare software company can avail you of many benefits like:
Better Patient Experience
A professional healthcare software developer can manage your medical software very smoothly and effectively. This could help in delivering better patient experiences. It also enables you to get access to the patient’s information before the appointment.
A dedicated healthcare development company will ensure to deliver faster patient checks with lesser paperwork. The information is filed electronically and considers order prescriptions smoothly.
Easy Scheduling and Maintenance
Healthcare software development services offer a strong scheduling system. It helps in finding out the convenient date and time for the patient’s appointment at their comfort. The medical software is flexible to perform such tasks smoothly. It also solves the issues of overbooking through proper scheduling.
Easy Billing and EHR
Billing is an intimidating task in the healthcare industry. A good healthcare software offers easy billing and EHR facilities. It also helps you automate the processes involved in the EHR model.
Healthcare software development services: Important factors to consider
Focus on usability and ease of use
Healthcare employees have a busy job. So, they prefer a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate interface. Only such an interface could ensure a high user adoption rate.
Additionally, healthcare institutions need to prepare their employees for any changes in their working process that the new software solutions might bring. For that, they need to provide adequate training and support, so that when the time comes, they can derive the maximum advantages out of the software solutions according to Vishal Shah from TatvaSoft.com
Integration with various applications
Various system integration requirements are used to make sure the new solutions work properly with other systems. You should also look further for whether current legacy systems need any upgrades to integrate them with the new solutions.
A professional administration
Access to the data by specialist doctors to update the data is necessary. However, access to the data should be strictly restricted with proper arrangements.
Information security
Medical care organizations need proper security measures with laws on data, protection, and other security principles. A leak of patient information is a critical issue that may cause weighty business misfortune. Only the approved staff with rights to oversee the admittance to information and patient records can approach the necessary data.
Development costs
Development costs depend on the size and complexity of the software or applications which is directly connected to the specific business needs of the healthcare organizations. First, an organization needs to identify key problems that require software solutions.
Also, consider the future IT needs of healthcare institutions such as potential business expansion and its scalability and integration requirements. A mobile workforce can help your organization attain more efficient workflow and enhanced productivity.
Healthcare IT infrastructure
IT infrastructure includes hardware, devices, internet connection speed, and/or mobile 4G connection, and many more. Healthcare agencies need to consider whether such infrastructure will be offered by the development company or if the organization has to use its resources.
While using employees’ resources may compromise security, it is suggested that employees must be given the devices and technologies by the companies. The devices and technology need to be updated on the regular basis.
Questions to Ask Healthcare Software Development Company
We have compiled a list of some questions that could help you get the best and most suitable medical IOS and Android app development partner.
Do you know/understand how HIPAA privacy protection rules might apply to healthcare software products?
HIPAA can be subtle and complicated. Federal and state laws have included HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules for the privacy and security protections for hospitals and medical institutions.
There will be many healthcare software developers who won’t be familiar with HIPAA and how it is applied to the products. You must check that out.
Can we sign an NDA?
If your business idea is precious from the IP (Intellectual Properties) perspective then you must ask the app development company to sign the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) before you discuss any details of the project. It is also signed to protect sensitive business details from any third party.
Can I have the contact information of your former clients?
It is vital to have a look at the mobile application development agency before you consider them to hire. However, you won’t get the entire picture and other details but to get that you can ask the company for the contact information of some of their former clients.
Get in touch with their former clients, ask them about their experience working with the agency. The goal is to not only have a great app at the end but also go through an app development process that is stress-free, easy, and enjoyable.
Checking for reviews and references is the key when it comes to hiring mobile application developers.
What is your Software development methodology?
Latest best practices like scrum and agile development are far more reliable compared to conventional methods. Software development companies nowadays practice them to be more efficient and productive. They understand that the market changes quickly and to cope up with it, they need to be capable of adapting to the changes quickly.
How experienced are your healthcare software developers?
Check for the experience of the developers employed by your medical software development partner. They need to be qualified to build medical solutions and deliver them within a predetermined budget and timeline.
How to choose?
Even if you have decided to work with a healthcare software development company, there are hundreds of companies out there, and all claim to be the best in the field. How would you choose the one that can help you achieve your goals?
Analyze their Area of Expertise and their Experience as a Healthcare Software Developer
Quality is the one thing that should be never compromised no matter how complex your demands are. In the software development healthcare industry there are many standards and compliance requirements like HIS and HIPAA that need to be catered to.
Therefore, you need to analyze their area of expertise and their experiences. Only experienced healthcare software vendors can understand and fulfill the critical needs of customers.
However, expertise isn't enough. You also need to look at the certifications to gain deeper knowledge about the healthcare solution developers’ level of professionalism.
Go Through Their Healthcare Software Development Portfolio to Get a Better Idea of Projects and Quality
Go through the portfolio of the potential healthcare software development partner. Look at their past projects in the healthcare domain and check if it matches your requirements. Research about their market reputation and reach as well as find out whether they serve the organizations in your niche.
The key factors to look for in the portfolio:
Types of healthcare software they have delivered in the past
Clients they have served- names, strength, and value
The complexity of projects they’ve handled
The kind of experience they provide to the users
Technologies they excel in
Reviews and Ratings Could Be Helpful
Find out what the customers are talking about this company. Analyze their reviews and ratings. Understand how a particular healthcare software development company deals with their clients and cater to their services.
Carefully Understand their Process
Almost every company has a unique process to provide their healthcare software development services. But all processes generally consists of the following:
1. Requirement analysis
2. Scope freezing
3. Product prototyping
4. Product development
5. QA and testing
6. Deployment
7. Post-launch support
These software development processes could follow any approach from waterfall to agile methodology. Know the details of the process from your healthcare software development partner and understand how it aligns with your goals. And never hesitate to clear your doubts.
Know the Cost to Develop a Healthcare Software
Everyone has a budget and make sure you have communicated well about your software development budget with your potential healthcare technology partner. Ask them about the cost to build the software and look for the cost to quality ratio. After gathering all the necessary details, make an informed decision.
Understand the Engagement Models to Choose the Best
Engagement models are the ways of collaboration for the business relationship. You can choose from the following:
A. Turnkey Engagement Model
It is also known as the fixed price model. When you share your demands, you get a fixed quote for the work. This is an ideal model for:
Short-term projects
Projects with a well-defined scope
For assigning test tasks to the developers
B. Time and Material Basis Model
In this model, hiring is done based on time and material. A client agrees to pay a hired software development company based on the time the developers spend after developing their products and other relevant tasks. The payments are done according to the mutually agreed hourly rate. The model is suitable when:
Unclear requirements or specifications,
A long-term project with dynamic pricing
The client needs more flexibility
C. Dedicated Hiring Model
As the name suggests, it enables you to hire dedicated resources from the web development company. One can hire a web development company for your project, depending on the number of hours spent by the developers on your project. This model is best suited for:
Clients who are looking for an extension to their in-house team
Those who have unclear project requirements
The hirer is looking for more flexibility
Find out What Does the Healthcare Software Development Company has to Offer Post-launch
You are mistaken if you believe that the healthcare software development cycle ends with the launch of the product. There are chances of hitting obstacles any time and do not forget that the market keeps changing in terms of technology and user demands. This means you might need to upgrade your software or need to add some features to it.
For all such requirements, the healthcare software development agency offers support and maintenance services for a limited time post-launch. There could be specific terms and conditions for it too.
So, before you hire any agency, do not forget to inquire about the support and maintenance services offered by them and its price.
What is the Team Structure that They Would Provide You?
Ask about the team structure offered by the company for your software development project. You can interview a potential team of software developers if you want to. You should do it to assess the capacity of the team. In general, a software development team consists of:
1. Requirement analyst
2. Project manager
3. UI/UX designer
4. Software developer
5. QA tester and engineer
Also, you need to convey your requirements clearly to the software development agency so that they can do justice to your project.
Ability of a Healthcare Software Development Company to Assist You For Expanding Your Software’s Features
The main goal of developing medical software is to increase the efficiency of your operations, automate them, enhance them, and last but not least: offer a better patient experience. Therefore, above all other things, you must check out the ability of the custom healthcare software development company to expand or scale-up the product as per your needs.
Areas of Use
Custom healthcare development is used in the following areas:
Telemedicine
Telemedicine is a flourishing branch for custom software development companies in the healthcare business. App development is crucial for telemedicine and healthcare providers because it facilitates teleconsultation and healthcare information. Mobile applications play a key role in sharing medical services and information among patients.
Healthcare portals and patient databases
There is a wide scope for a healthcare app or a patient portal that could compile and store the data categorically over long periods.
This type of storage of health data can be accessible by the doctors in the form of medical records when they are seeing the patient, even if it is the first time. One can pull the data off the EMR and EHR which maintains such a set of data records. To ensure the protection of the data, personal information is kept confidential and only between the patient and doctor, on the portals.
E-consultations and e-prescription
E-consultation is one of the latest practices in digital healthcare services. Mobile apps are developed that are compatible with both iOS as well as Android and are user-friendly.
Such applications enable patients to consult with the doctors remotely based on their healthcare needs and get e-prescriptions as well. They can also get online treatment plans for certain diagnoses through this. The healthcare software developers have similar solutions for virtual billing software and e-pharmacy management.
VR and AR healthcare software development
Since their initial release, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have been very helpful in medical care especially in the COVID-19 remote healthcare scene. Ran through a powerful technology stack, AR-VR enables the patient to feel and see how a treatment or a medical device works.
Big Data and AI solutions for healthcare
Healthcare is one of the Big Data industries. It manages the flow of large volumes of medical data daily. To ensure that the collected data is used well, healthcare services are now powered by AI.
Health tracking and fitness apps
Wearable technology is gaining immense popularity these days. The products include smartwatches and bands that could track heart rate, sleep cycles, number of steps walked, and many more. These kinds of applications built by expert healthcare developers are among the most downloaded on the internet.
Conclusion
Custom healthcare software is important for healthcare organizations to make their process easier as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic is further popularizing telemedicine, e-consultation, AI solutions, fitness, and other health applications.
I know choosing a suitable healthcare software development company is not easy, but if you follow the process mentioned in this article, you can get the best and top-rated software developers who create apps for the medical and health care industries.
I hope this article has guided you well to understand better about healthcare software development companies. However, if you have any queries or suggestions, please connect with us in the comments section below.
Read More
Health Technology
Article | July 5, 2023
Your patients have grown to trust your expertise and recommendations in matters regarding their healthcare. As the sector transitions into a more digital playing field, uninterrupted network connectivity is more than just a bonus; it’s a necessity.
While there are many different challenges to completely integrating your practice into the digital world, internet outages are the costliest. Downtime can be caused by various factors, which can compromise patient safety, the faith your team instills in you, and your practice’s reputation and revenue. However, investing in the means to maintain a resilient network lets you maximize your network uptime to optimize resources.
We'll look at four different strategies and their benefits for your infrastructure so you can focus on what you do best: providing healthcare excellence to your patients.
Strengthening Network Infrastructure
The traditional way of doing things may be great for your remedies and techniques. Still, with a growing number of patients and their contextually relevant demands, your network needs to be able to accommodate many different booking requests, increase user activity on your server, and store sensitive patient information.
High-speed internet connections enhance your network performance and let you, your team, and your patients make the most of your uninterrupted uptime. Fiber-optic networks, when combined with load balancing and proper segmentation, can diffuse and direct network traffic efficiency and prevent congestion, which prevents downtime due to overload.
Implementing Network Monitoring and Management Tools
Much like your patients visit your practice to ensure everything is all right with the current state of their health, your network must also receive the same treatment. Identifying and pre-emptively resolving potential issues and vulnerabilities will prevent much more destructive or expensive problems from occurring.
Use real-time tools to monitor your bandwidth usage and gain visibility of potential bottlenecks. Tools that offer risk monitoring deliver alerts about critical events that pose a threat to your business continuity. Your IT team will be better equipped to troubleshoot issues promptly and optimize performance.
Conducting Regular Network Assessments and Audits
Once you have the proper monitoring tools to manage your network topology better, proactive troubleshooting is a great way to spot-check whether your current solution is working as it should. A network audit is much like proactive troubleshooting; you are looking to see if anything could harm the overall system and catch it before it can develop.
When auditing a network, the primary focus should be security measures. If patient and confidential data is not secure, the smooth operations of your business are the least of your worries. When conducting an audit, consulting with a network service provider will help identify issues with your protocols, data encryption, and firewall configuration.
Establishing Redundancy and Disaster Recovery Plans
Backing up private and confidential data is crucial to ensuring that sensitive information is not lost or exposed. Minimizing network downtime can often be achieved by having backup systems that will keep running in the event of an attack or outage. For example, a dedicated Cloud Access Network, power supplies, and switches will go a long way.
When creating an internet contingency plan, outline steps and protocols with your team that you will take in the event of a complete failure, including things such as brand reputation management, customer service, and data loss prevention.
Looking Forward
As the lines between in-person and digital are blurred, navigating the complexities of implementing a robust network is paramount to your business.
Strengthening your infrastructure, integrating redundant systems, and conducting regular audits and assessments with the proper monitoring and management tools will help you maximize uptime usage and minimize network downtime.
Although overwhelming, working with a reputable network service provider can help you embrace your network topology to remain competitive.
Read More