Consider this basic case: a patient gets a yearly check-up from his primary care physician. Before anything at all happens, the patient has to set an appointment. Plenty of physician offices around the world still rely on phones to set appointments. That means at least one person has to stand by the phone at all times, and they can’t do anything else while working the phones. Or, even worse, someone has to do another job while also answering calls from patients.

Meanwhile, all of that scheduling work can be avoided with a web and/or mobile application for managing appointments. And that’s just one, very basic use case that happens before you even get to see the doctor.

Right around the corner, there’s another case for software — insurance verification. Healthcare providers live in a symbiotic relationship with insurance providers. When you’re a patient, a lot is determined by whether you have insurance and how good your package is. Instead of doing it manually, digital insurance verification can happen in real-time while the patient is scheduling an appointment.

We’re not even at the doctor’s office yet, and we already have two healthcare software types that can improve the quality of patient care:
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• Appointment scheduling,
• Insurance verification.

What else is there? A whole world of innovative solutions that can make healthcare better:

• Digital prescriptions,
• Rehabilitation/treatment support (wearables or apps),
• Online physician consultations,
• Data exchange between different organizations,
• Automation of administrative work,
• Digitally-enabled tools for surgery,
• Holographic/VR/AR educational tools for future doctors,
• Electronic health records...

...and plenty more.

One of the main problems with innovation in healthcare is that it’s not an agile industry. There are many forces of influence at play here, and almost nothing is straightforward.  Organizations in healthcare exist in a space between government regulators, public healthcare, private healthcare, insurance companies, technology providers, suppliers, healthcare experts, and patients. The industry itself is insanely complex, so building software for healthcare is naturally difficult.  

Projects usually have a lot of stakeholders, and delivery times can stretch out indefinitely due to mounting issues, like inability to meet regulatory compliance or extensive quality assurance. Funding is rarely simple in healthcare, and it can involve government subsidies, funds from health organizations, or corporate capital. Each funding provider might have different requirements for the investment.

All of the above creates a lot of overhead costs from the get-go, and we didn’t even get to the technological implementation part yet. Let’s see:

• Organizations often rely on legacy systems that are difficult to work with,
• You need to go through a lot of hurdles to get access to medical data of any kind,
• The highest security standards are necessary throughout the whole development and deployment process,
• Compliance with regulations and stakeholder requirements causes big technological limitations.  

These are just some of the hurdles one needs to overcome to implement new technologies in healthcare. All in all, this industry isn’t very agile, and you should keep that in mind when you’re planning your project, choosing your tech stack, and looking for technology providers.