How to modernize and redesign your healthcare product: Ultimate Guide by Artkai

Development

Digital Transformation

August 19, 2024

How to modernize and redesign your healthcare product: Ultimate Guide by Artkai

In a world where digital processes change rapidly, ensuring your business is user-friendly and customer-oriented is crucial. This is especially true for healthcare software, where modernization is essential to keep up with industry demands and provide a better user experience.

According to Statista, in Q3 2022, there were 54,546 healthcare apps in Google Play and 41,517 medical or health-related apps in the App Store. Plus, some private applications were used only by specific healthcare providers and hence, were not in stores. Should this stop you from creating an app of your own? Not in 2024. The demand for digital health options is so high that you will surely find your place on the market, especially if you follow our recommendations.

In 2024, the digital health and MedTech sector continues its rapid growth, driven by increasing healthcare costs, a growing global population, and rising demand for remote and personalized care. According to Statista, digital health services are projected to generate $193.69 billion in revenue this year, a significant increase from $45.69 billion in 2017.

At Artkai, we have over 8 years of experience modernizing healthcare software to make it more functional and user-friendly. In this article, we share our insights on how to modernize and redesign your healthcare app.

How to identify legacy software in healthcare

Legacy software systems are outdated, with core technology that is no longer maintained or doesn’t meet current standards and needs. Examples include electronic health records (EHRs), administrative platforms, and communication networks. These systems often lack compatibility with other systems, mobile access, and the ability to adapt to new regulatory requirements.

Signs your software might be outdated:

Loss of support: missing critical security updates and new features if the vendor stops support.
Inefficient workflows: incompatibility with current operations indicates your business has outgrown the software.
Security vulnerabilities: susceptibility to security threats due to a lack of maintenance.
Monolithic and complex: difficulty in modifying or updating the system to adapt to new needs.

Modernized systems are faster, more efficient, flexible, and better equipped to meet your organization’s needs.

Business and technical reasons to modernize a healthcare app

From our experience with healthcare products’ modernization, here are the most popular business reasons why you may need to modernize your health tech product:

Reduced Market Responsiveness - Legacy systems can slow down a company's ability to adapt to market changes, digital transformation, or new regulations. This can lead to losing a competitive edge and facing penalties for non-compliance.
Poor Customer Experience - Outdated software often doesn't meet modern user expectations. This can lead to lower customer satisfaction, reduced loyalty, and a decline in market share.
Inability to Scale Operations - Legacy systems can limit a company's ability to grow efficiently. This makes it harder to seize new opportunities and expand market presence.
Incompatibility with Modern Ecosystems - Old systems can struggle to integrate with current technologies and platforms, reducing their effectiveness in today's tech landscape.
Cost Savings - Modernizing systems can save businesses a lot of money. However, the exact savings depend on each organization's specific situation and should be carefully assessed.

Technical reasons why you need to modernize a healthcare app are the following:

Outdated Technology - Legacy systems use old tools and technologies, making them incompatible with modern standards and practices.
Inefficient Performance - These systems often perform poorly and have slow response times, hurting productivity.
Security Vulnerabilities - Without updates and modern security measures, legacy systems are more prone to cyber threats.
High Maintenance Costs - Maintaining and supporting old systems can become increasingly expensive over time.
Limited Scalability - Scaling legacy systems to meet growing demands is often difficult and costly.
Information Silos - Poorly documented legacy code creates knowledge gaps. When employees leave, their successors may struggle to understand the old code, hindering progress and making updates challenging.

Getting started with modernization

From our experience with healthcare products’ modernizations and redesign, we recommend following this 6-step guide to the legacy app modernization process:

Step 1. Define reasons for app modernization

Step 2. Perform a technical audit of your app

Step 3. Conduct a UX audit of your product

Step 4. Define and assess all current limitations and development problems

Step 5. Select an appropriate modernization approach that could be:

encapsulating
rehosting
platform’s change
refactoring
architecture modernization
redesigning or rewriting

Step 6. Start improving the application and integrating new functionality

UX audit and redesign: Key initial steps

Conducting a UX audit is the first step in improving your health tech product or service. Our team identifies issues hindering conversion growth and enhances your product's UX, usability, and user satisfaction. A UX audit is essential for identifying and resolving usability issues in complex software systems. It helps:

Understand User Interaction: Gain insights into how users interact with your product and identify pain points.
Improve User Satisfaction: Enhance the user experience, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.
Increase Efficiency: Streamline workflows and improve the overall efficiency of your software.
Drive Conversion Growth: Address issues that hinder conversion rates and boost your product's performance.

Here's what a UX audit involves and the key activities the Artkai’s team performs:

Stakeholder Interviews - We engage with stakeholders to understand business objectives, product goals, and user needs.
Deliverables: Project brief and documented goals and KPIs.
Market and Trends Analysis - We analyze industry trends and market demands to keep your product competitive.
Deliverables: Market analysis report and trends overview.
Competitor Analysis - We study competitors’ products to find best practices and improvement areas.
Deliverables: Competitor analysis report.
Heuristic Evaluation - We review your product to identify usability issues.
Deliverables: Heuristic evaluation report.
Usability Testing - We gather real user feedback through usability tests. Deliverables: Usability tests report.
User Research - We conduct interviews and surveys to understand user needs and behaviors.
Deliverables: User research report, survey findings, and interview insights.
Analytics Review - We analyze user interaction data to gain insights into user behavior.
Deliverables: Analytics review report.
Customer Journey Mapping - We map the existing customer journey to find bottlenecks and improvement areas.
Deliverables: Customer journey map.
Hypothesis Formulation - We use data to form hypotheses that guide our design decisions.
Deliverables: Analytics review report with hypotheses and detailed analytics data.
Prioritization and Roadmapping - We prioritize UX improvements and create a roadmap for implementation.
Deliverables: Prioritized backlog and roadmap for UI/UX redesign.
Visual Presentation - We provide a presentation highlighting critical interface issues with recommendations for improvement.
Deliverables: Visual presentation with recommendations.

Choosing the right modernization strategy

At Artkai, we use six effective strategies for modernizing healthcare products:

Encapsulate - Extend your application's features by encapsulating its data and functions, making them available as services via an API. This ensures flexibility and scalability for new functionalities.
Refactor - Optimize existing code to remove technical debt and improve performance and maintainability, enhancing system efficiency over time.
Architecture Modernization - Alter the code to shift to a new application architecture, leveraging new and better capabilities to align with technological trends and business needs.
Complete Rebuild - Redesign or rewrite the application from scratch while preserving its scope and specifications, creating a robust and scalable solution tailored to current business requirements.

By using these strategies, Artkai's development team ensures efficient and effective modernization of client products, keeping them competitive and up-to-date with market demands and technological advancements.

Key challenges and best practices in healthcare system modernization

Businesses face several key challenges when modernizing healthcare systems:

Data Migration Risks: Transferring data to new platforms can be risky due to potential data loss, corruption, or leaks.
Integration: Finding a solution that integrates seamlessly with all necessary tools can be difficult.
Regulatory Compliance: Modernization efforts must comply with laws like HIPAA and GDPR.
Cost: Budget constraints can limit the scope of your modernization plan.

Our best practices of modernization and redesign say that it’s better to engage stakeholders early. This includes medical professionals, your IT team, and administrative support. These stakeholders can provide valuable insights into what your organization needs from a modernized system.

Additionally, you can select a tech partner with proven experience in healthcare system modernization. The right partner can guide you through the process and provide ongoing support.

Success stories: Artkai’s approach to legacy healthcare product modernization

Roche: Enhancing collaboration between pharma & healthcare specialists

About the project and business
Roche Switzerland, a leading healthcare enterprise with a 125-year history, approached us with their outdated HCP Portal. This digital environment for medical specialists provided information about Roche products but lacked practicality for both Roche representatives and medical specialists.

Development objectives and challenges
We needed to identify why the portal had low traffic and develop a strategy to increase it.

Development process
We began by interviewing about 15 project stakeholders to understand the portal's issues from various perspectives. Engaging in live communication with users, we gained insights into common use cases. During the quarantine lockdown, we held interactive online sessions with over 30 participants to identify potential improvements. Analyzing the collected data, we proposed a redesign strategy based on real user feedback. Finally, we translated our findings into concrete, actionable steps for the redesign.

Outcome
The client received a comprehensive strategy to boost portal traffic and usability, informed by thorough stakeholder and user research. This led to actionable steps for redesigning the HCP Portal, making it more practical and engaging.

SyrEx: Paperless Data Management & Visualization System

About the project and business
The clients needed an online data management and visualization system to provide universal access to real-time information on the spread of socially dangerous diseases like HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis.

Development objectives and challenges
Our challenge was to create an intuitive interface to help analysts from the major NGO, Alliance for Public Health, move away from time-consuming paperwork and replace Excel or similar tools with SyrEx.

Development process
We started with initial data analysis, then built a data structure and established various user scenarios to ensure system flexibility. We customized a visualization solution through a dashboard to meet the needs of both SyrEx and the Alliance for Public Health. Our team developed a unique solution featuring linear and spatial data and a tree visualization for easy access to health information of family members. Additionally, we built a landing page to showcase all product features and possibilities.

Outcomes
Artkai’s solution enabled real-time analysis, storage, and visualization of data in one place. The client was able to reach 250,000 people in 39 countries annually, averting 50,000 HIV infections.

Wrapping up

Modernizing and redesigning your healthcare product is essential to stay competitive and meet user needs. By following our guide and leveraging Artkai's expertise, you can ensure your healthcare software remains effective, efficient, and user-friendly.

If you need consultation or are looking for a team to help with software modernization, contact us at Artkai. We're here to assist you in transforming your healthcare solutions.