Healthcare is known for its dependence on outdated legacy infrastructure and reluctance to adopt new digital transformation tech. It’s also skeptical towards high-tech innovations. However, that doesn’t mean healthcare needs a SaaS or UI/UX design agency less than other industries. On the contrary, its sensitive nature in handling human life and patient data means it needs technology more.
Fortunately, COVID-19 brought some positive shakeups that awakened the sleeping giant to embrace technology. During and after the pandemic, we saw a positive rise in virtual tool adoption, such as video appointments, remote patient monitoring, and e-messaging.
So, how can healthcare players bring themselves on par with other industries? How can healthcare facilities successfully implement SaaS solutions and forge ahead? This post examines these questions and offers data-based answers. Read on to learn how healthcare players can integrate SaaS into their overall service delivery strategies.
Why Healthcare Needs SaaS Solutions
Let’s begin by looking at why healthcare needs SaaS solutions. Objective evidence suggests that the healthcare industry lags behind other sectors in technology adoption. This reluctance often blinds the sector to the business visualization for perceiving their innovation’s commercial possibilities. Sometimes, they get so swarmed in the innovation processes that they overlook their complementary support infrastructure.
Below are the benefits that necessitate speedy SaaS adoption in healthcare.
- SaaS solutions help healthcare negate the need to host data on physical servers. This way, they reduce their overall overheads.
- Enabling remote access to information to make patient care is now real, especially following the pandemic.
- Healthcare facilities can enjoy flexible pay-per-use models.
- Improved data security.
- Easy telehealth implementation.
- Increased collaboration within and outside the industry.
- Implementing and maintaining SaaS is cost-effective.
- SaaS is scalable.
- SaaS solutions facilitate easy and quick backups.
- Healthcare SaaS facilities enjoy real-time updates.
- It increases accessibility.
- SaaS offers fast and better upgrades.
5 Ways for Successful SaaS Implementation in Healthcare
Healthcare facilities have five top ways to implement SaaS. This section examines them in detail.
Recognize Suitability Based on Business Needs
Healthcare SaaS solutions are flexible and offer various customizable technical developments to meet specific needs. Healthcare providers should focus on the SaaS environment’s underlying architecture when launching new software products. Under such circumstances, free trials, discounts, and relevant product upgrades are the best options.
On the other hand, an on-premise healthcare software firm considering a partial shift to SaaS might test the demand for healthcare SaaS solutions.
Splitting the functionality and structuring subscription plans to obtain new users continually is critical in the two cases. This approach facilitates a full transition to a SaaS model if the app is sufficiently redesigned and marketed well.
Maintain Easy Deployment and Infrastructure Management
Implementing SaaS solutions for healthcare facilities isn’t enough. Users involved in the deployment need to complete the process without hassles. They can do this by investing in a UI technology for the SaaS solution to meet the operators’ skill sets.
The best SaaS solutions are usually marketed based on easy usage. Thus, health facilities must ensure that the SaaS provider offers solutions anyone can use. Additionally, the software must integrate with other applications by supporting all relevant standards.
The SaaS solution must not make the healthcare provider spend more money training its staff to use the solution. Therefore, the burden of integrating an app’s infrastructure with a SaaS platform should be minimized for optimal results.
Ensure Maximum Compliance
A healthcare facility seeking to incorporate a SaaS solution into its systems should ensure maximum compliance. While moving to the cloud is perfect, it isn’t enough if the agency fails to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations when utilizing a cloud provider.
Moreover, SaaS solution providers should familiarize themselves with all the applicable HIPAA compliance requirements when serving healthcare facilities. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights’ most recent guidance on HIPAA and cloud computing contains all the details. It instructs how companies must approach cloud computing intersection, business associate agreements, and how these efforts tie back to HIPAA regulations.
The requirements are numerous, but we have listed the four main points SaaS providers and healthcare facilities should know about:
- Find all applications in your healthcare facility containing private health information.
- Review every contract.
- Set compliance standards.
- Conduct regular audits.
Solve Knotty Problems
The SaaS industry has enjoyed its boom. But some SaaS companies created and pitched redundant, overpriced solutions that made customers feel tired and overwhelmed by these offers. Things are even more complicated in the sensitive healthcare industry because adopting new SaaS technology requires alignment among different stakeholders.
Therefore, healthcare players should exercise due diligence to adopt solutions that only address their most pressing needs. These SaaS solutions must offer health facilities the best returns on their investments.
The SaaS products must also offer unique solutions beyond the immediate problems they solve. For instance, the solution must leverage cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing and machine learning. Further, the offer should use next-generation tools to solve problems with optimal allocation of resources.
Use Clean Protocols
Lastly, implementing a successful SaaS solution in healthcare should use clean protocols. Clean data is one of the necessities for successful SaaS protocol adoption. Thus, the cloud provider should clean the information received if it contains duplicates and redundancies to meet this objective.
It’s worth noting that health facilities usually have large amounts of raw, unstructured data in heterogeneous formats. Thankfully, shifting to a SaaS platform is the best way of solving some of the problems they encounter due to using non-interoperable platforms and separate systems. Therefore, a valuable initial step in the transition to SaaS is choosing a way to bring your data to order and align it with one standard.
Conclusion
For many years, the healthcare industry lagged behind other industries in technology adoption. Still, it has recently made some positive moves to get onto the high-tech bandwagon, partly due to the COVID-19 pressure for digitalization. The pandemic accelerated the shift and focused the healthcare actors’ efforts on the need to adopt SaaS and other cloud-based solutions. Thus, it makes sense to expect a broader-scale digital transition in the healthcare industry in the coming years.
