Kick-off Healthcare IT Development in 4 Steps

Developers and their skills play a large role in the success of healthcare IT efforts. It’s true. But even before that, one thing can separate the good projects from the game-changers — a plan.

Before beginning healthcare software development consider these four things.

1. Find a mobile or digital partner who seeks out new technologies

This will give your business the upper hand in a competitive marketplace. If your partner continually seeks to understand and implement emerging technologies, you will be able to adapt  and grow your solution faster than competitors.

2. Explore your target audience

Any good development partner will take you through a series of ideation exercises to determine your user personas and help you understand how these key audiences will interact with your solution and what they will gain.

Knowing who your core users are is pivotal to anticipating their needs as your software evolves.

3. Choose a solution: mobile or web

Different variables can influence whether you decide to build a native app, responsive website,  portal or combination of the three. Web applications are appealing to many since they translate well onto a majority of devices — desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones and the web-browser-enabled cars of the future. Historically, web applications haven’t been able to leverage the robust technical capabilities as well as native apps. This gap is quickly closing.

Top 2 reasons to create a web app

• They’re less expensive to produce
• They don’t require device-specific customization

Considering current capabilities, native apps generally have better offline capabilities. They are the only choice if your solution requires integration with Bluetooth devices. Producing a native app also makes more sense if your solution will require a significant amount of on-device storage.

Maybe you don’t have to choose at all. Often, product road maps include a native app and web experience. A top development partner can help you maximize your spend on development and design.

4. Define your priority features

Selecting the features you would like your solution to launch with will help you set up a reasonable development roadmap. To do this, you must know your user personas. To determine the user perspectives, first identify the scenarios of use.

• Who are these people?
• How will they interact with the application?
• Why do they want to interact with the application?
• What are their goals?

The best development partners go through this process with you. Feature prioritization allows you to remain on-time and on-budget bringing your solution to market.

Photo courtesy of MPFphotography.