Intuitive apps that improve healthcare

From clinical care, nursing care, patient experience, care at home, and medical research

To help you think outside the normal boundaries of what intuitive healthcare apps could mean for your product or organization, we will tell you about some cases that we found very interesting. Some innovative apps use mobile phones or tablets to bring clients and medical professionals closer, no matter where they are. Mobile apps for inpatient processes help medical professionals streamline in-hospital processes to outpatient care, helping the client and medical staff.

But not only phones and tablets, but wearables are becoming another standard mobile device. Smartwatches are part of the intuitive healthcare app solutions; you could use them to measure daily healthcare indicators for the elderly, enabling them to live healthily and safely at home for a longer period, or perhaps researching the physiological data of patients with certain mental conditions. From preventive care to in-hospital care to follow-up care, technology enables a new level of efficiency that can be personable—no matter which technology you wish to use.

Intuitive mobile technologies

There is more than one road leading to Rome when looking at mobile technologies and the value they can bring to your solutions. In this post, I would like to look at the Apple Healthcare platform, which was created to make healthcare more personal. Apple has devices to connect citizens with healthcare professionals: iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. And it has the technology to do some pretty amazing things that cover all types of care. It connects people in their home environment to medical professionals, care providers, and medical researchers. And although we look at Apple as being very innovative with its platform, the innovations can be created using different technologies.

The benefits of intuitive healthcare apps

Care from home

One of the biggest benefits is that you can deliver care at home. A very simple statement but one with so much value. First, each client that is treated at home puts less stress on the healthcare systems. Plus, patients feel safer at home; they recover more quickly in their personal environment, and it is easier for parents and loved ones to provide care at home to the patient.

At UVA, they have used it to enable neonatal care at home. Instead of spending extra days and even weeks in the hospital, the premature babies can go home at a particular stage as parents can perform the daily checks at home, using the app on the iPad to keep the medical team up to date status.

Efficiencies of processes

Apple products are used in hospitals to connect the medical staff with their clients. Doctors and nurses don’t sit behind desks; they are on the move visiting patients and providing care. So it is efficient to register information in the systems using mobile devices. At Ochsner, they use apps to improve workflow efficiencies in managing patient care, initiating more frequent and dynamic patient interaction. There is one, for example, to give physicians access to their patient lists, hospital admissions and discharges, and patient records via their iPhone or Apple Watch. The intuitive apps can be used for front-end patient purposes and back-office processes performed by the medical staff.

Medical research possibilities

The healthcare platform also has a research kit that is being used, among others, by:

• Duke Health to research how to detect autism at the earliest moment possible,
• the University of Rochester researching Parkinson’s disease, or
• John Hopkins Medicine with the epi-watch, studying the physiological data during epileptic seizures.

Components ready to add to your apps

So, don’t think Apple Healthcare platform offers you ready to go apps. Nor think that it has entered the vertical market for healthcare solutions. Apple brings together their popular devices with the technology, added some ready to apply features, but you still need to develop your healthcare app. Or rather, you can have a technology partner do that for you. And …. Apple is one mobile technology provider. Other technologies can also be used to create innovative and intuitive healthcare apps. Just send me an email, and we can discuss how apps can help you forward and which technology would suit your needs.

Paul Cirstean, Business Developer and Manager Innovation

You can find the information and interesting videos and customer testimonials on the Apple Health Platform.

Click on the following link if you want to take a peek into, for example, the predefined active tasks in the researcher kit. It gives you a good insight into the possibilities, even if you are not a developer.