Improving the speed at which hospital IT can be brought to market
As healthcare providers around the world grapple with ever-increasing healthcare workforce shortages and rising demand for services, low-code technologies have proven instrumental in bridging these dual challenges and promoting positive outcomes for both patients and physicians.
Take the case of Mount Alvernia Hospital, a 300-bed private, non-profit medical facility in Singapore. From the usual three months, it now releases applications after a few weeks using a powerful low-code platform.
Need for speed
Like the rest of the industry, Mount Alvernia found itself in a situation during the pandemic where it had to raise the bar in its digital transformation. This included the rapid development and implementation of critical solutions such as health tracking and reporting.
“We initially relied on the waterfall development model on .net and Java platforms, but the need for speed and flexibility led us to partner with OutSystems,” said Bruce Leong, the hospital’s director of technology and strategy. Healthcare IT news.
OutSystems’ platform has enabled their 13-person IT development team to build solutions “in record time” using references from pre-built templates and plugins.
Their move to no-code technology met with no resistance from the IT team; It even boosted their morale as they were able to skip the often tedious and time-consuming work of traditional coding. This allowed them to better meet the constant demands of staff and physicians to reduce the development time of new solutions to just 1-2 weeks.
Since the pandemic, Mount Alvernia’s IT team has created thirteen applications, including the Staff Health System (which was initially a contact tracing solution), the physician registry, medical record keeping, and electronic meal ordering.
In addition to improving the team’s speed-to-market capabilities, OutSystems also took care of their platform’s cybersecurity. Leonard Tan, regional director of OutSystems Singapore and Greater China, explains:
“Our platform offers 500 validations from design to runtime, ensuring that every aspect built with it prioritizes security. This includes automated solutions for DDOS attacks, newly identified code vulnerabilities, and mobile threats. Additionally, IT teams can of enterprises to improve security assurance by deploying enterprise SAST solutions.”
“These solutions provide a robust governance model tailored for enterprise software factories and come with compliance designations such as SOC2, HIPAA and more. These measures allow our applications to seamlessly scale from department-level use to handling millions of concurrent users, without sacrificing security, speed or performance. Our AI-driven performance tool continuously monitors the code, ensuring consistent performance and top-level scalability.”
Promoting innovation
“(Low-coding) not only accelerated development, but also allowed our team to focus on innovation instead of reinventing the wheel.”
Bruce Leong, Director of Technology and Strategy, Mount Alvernia Hospital
As part of their DNA, innovation is also in line with the hospital’s digital transformation strategy to remain agile. The Mount Alvernia IT team is currently developing a new patient application called Alvernia Connect.
Sharing more details about the project, he said: “Alvernia Connect represents a leap forward in our digital engagement with doctors and patients. This app is designed to streamline and digitize processes that were previously manual and time-consuming.
“We expect a positive response, especially for features like digital admission forms and appointment scheduling, which significantly reduce wait times and paperwork. Our goal with Alvernia Connect is not just to introduce convenience, but to provide the patient with a seamless and stress-free experience .”
The first module of Alvernia Connect is planned to be released soon this first quarter of the year.
Assisting AI development
As many as 70% of new internal applications will be developed using low- or no-code technologies by 2025, Tan said.
“In APAC, we continue to see more and more emerging use cases (of low or no-code technologies) across industries, with the healthcare sector being one that we see going through significant digital transformation. With the shift to patient-centricity, digitalization of healthcare services in APAC will continue to accelerate.”
Leonard Tan, Regional Director, OutSystems Singapore and Greater China
Low-code can play an important role in the development of applications such as patient portals and mobile apps, hospital management systems, medication management systems and monitoring and triage systems.
In the ongoing AI revolution, low-code can also help develop AI-powered tools for monitoring patient conditions, managing medications, and providing convenient interactions through chatbots and more. “With the rise of AI, low-code can help healthcare players efficiently build AI-powered applications and improve customer experience without having to do complex coding work,” said Tan.
Stay agile
Today, people over 60 years old make up 14% of the region’s population; by the end of this decade this is expected to rise to 18% and account for a quarter of the population by 2050. In addition to this rapid rate of population growth, the demand for healthcare services that are more convenient and personalized is also expected to increase.
“In the coming years, we anticipate increasing demand for healthcare, driven by the aging population in Asia, with Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan leading the way. As a result, healthcare providers will find it increasingly difficult to supply nursing staff. keep pace with demand growth.”
“Additionally, increasing consumer demand for omnichannel experiences is forcing the healthcare industry to increasingly adopt new innovations such as digital tools and AI.”
“As more healthcare players develop new applications for both internal and patient use, there is also an increasing demand for shorter development cycles, with IT teams expected to deliver applications within one to two weeks.”
Leong advises the healthcare industry to “remain flexible and agile enough to tap into new solutions to meet these demands.”
“To combat the healthcare workforce shortage, it becomes even more urgent to increase productivity and efficiency, and this is where technology and automation play a key role.”