It used to be in the healthcare arena, that investment dollars followed the companies searching for the next new breakthrough drug or treatment. Recently however, the opportunities and incentives have started to shift to less glamorous products aimed at health care efficiency, and cost-control using SaaS, RIAs and optimized user experience design.
A $19 billion nudge
This move is spurred in part, by provider funding freezes, regulatory scrutiny and the growing push for universal health coverage. The other driving force, of course, is the $19 billion in the Obama stimulus package to encourage doctors to convert to digital medical records.
Efficiency and cost-cutting through health care software solutions can be achieved in many ways, across many sectors of the healthcare industry - in everything from research, to Pharma clinical trial management to patient scheduling, records and billing. The design of these applications will be a high growth area in both the short and long term. SaaS solutions will grow particularly fast as tighter regulatory compliance forces more standardization and interoperability in healthcare protocols, reporting and practice.
The success of these new applications will depend on how well they are designed to maximize efficiency, usability and performance. A few of the key best practices for successful application design include: define the high value scenarios, determine the best conceptual model, user-validate, design for perceived control using RIAs, and create application UI that is modular and reusable.
So where will optimized UI and SaaS application design play especially prominent roles? Here are a few targets that are already moving steadily in that direction:
Medical Research
Efficiencies in clinical research can be achieved from analyzing workflows, user interactions and then designing software interfaces to streamline the process. For example, for Ventana Medical we developed a dynamic Rich Internet Application (RIA) that interfaced to a piece of complex equipment for immunohistochemical assays for diagnosis of cancer and infectious disease. The new user interface greatly increased efficiency and reduced delays, allowing labs to do more screening in less time.
Pharma
Pharma is already moving to a SaaS model, particularly for clinical trials with electronic data capture (EDC) and analysis, and sales & marketing using CRM. The SaaS delivery model allows companies to easily scale resources as needed depending on the number of drugs in clinical trials or based on a dynamically changing sales force. Ease of use, performance and mobile access will be the key drivers.
Patient scheduling, records and billing has Service written all over it
Less than 9% of U.S. physicians in small practices and less than 30% in medium size offices are using digital patient records, according to a June 2008 study in The New England Journal of Medicine. This represents an enormous opportunity for companies to develop solutions to provide provides patient registration, scheduling, patient electronic health records with HIPAA compliance, clinical work flow, billing and collections. The key to success is to package the technology, functionality, and support at a cost/usability/perfomance level that makes it accessible to the average physician. This translates directly to user-validated UI and a SaaS business model. A well-designed modular SaaS application will be able to handle a sole practitioner seeing 20 patients a day or a multi-clinic operation seeing hundreds of patients a day.
Moving beyond the entrenched culture
Healthcare is one of the largest software and IT footprint has the most to benefit from the use of SaaS and user experience design. The biggest challenge will be cultural. But change is finding its way through the cracks and the new federal stimulus money will be a compelling motivator.
Categories: SaaS, Healthcare, User Experience