As Deloitte observed, people choose to stay in a hotel this year because they feel more secure there (89% of respondents) and prefer the amplified sense of control over exposure and their own safety (86% of respondents).

In the given circumstances, industry players are in constant search for cutting-edge technologies that will provide the desired level of control and safety for their visitors.

In this regard, smart rooms are the tools that meet these needs and serve a variety of other purposes, including improving guest experience to increase revenue.

However, many businesses hesitate to implement them due to a lack of knowledge regarding their use cases and challenges. In today’s post, we’ll go over the best smart room technologies and reveal their substantial benefits to let you create a smart room blueprint for your own solution.

What Is Smart Room and How Does Everything Work?

Thanks to IoT devices, a smart room appears as an app that helps guests find, book, pay, and control their hotel stay on site on their smartphones or through a single smart hub.

The popularity and number of features inside smart room solutions are growing, making the app or the smart hub more and more accurately designed to make booking a hotel room easy, secure, and more enjoyable, both for guests and owners.

The range of applications of smart rooms is tremendous and goes beyond the ability to search for available hotels in your city or use the wireless connection and USB charges as in-room technology in hotels.

The solution establishes the basis for a hyperpersonalized experience for guests, meaning that each action, device, and facility can be adjusted to their needs at the comfort of owners.

For example, smart room technology can let the guest choose the preferred temperature and entertainment without the need to switch between separate devices. Also, travelers and housekeepers can interact with anti-virus robots that bring them morning coffee and newspapers, along with numerous other use cases.

10 Smart Room Technologies Your Hotel Can Implement Today

Smart room technology is still novel yet effective, which means a promising business advantage for hotels that adopt it before others. But nobody wants to invest in non-working solutions. For your convenience, we’ve gathered the most cost-effective tactics and tools hotels can apply today in this section.

1. Personalized Room Controls

In this case, IoT-enabled key devices (like lighting, heating, air conditioning systems, blinds, or draperies) will be connected to the hotel’s systems through a central controller, be that a smart hub, speaker, smartphone, or tablet. This way, the smart room lets guests manage multiple devices on their phones. In their turn, owners can get more control over the resources they spend.

2. Voice Control for Entertainment

There are various ways to apply voice recognition in smart hotel rooms, starting from managing TV to navigating through pay-to-view entertainment on several devices. In this regard, Amazon Echo and Alexa are the most popular devices with this function in hotels to date.

3. Smart Hubs

With smart room technology, guests and owners can improve room service collaboratively. In particular, smart hubs can let your guests order breakfast in bed, book an appointment with an on-site masseuse, and even arrange for a post-workout shower.

4. Interactive Hotel Maps

A wall map in a hotel can be enriched with augmented reality to provide more interesting and interactive experiences to clients. Depending on the level of sophistication, this smart room technology can help your guests find their way around and even tell you when their favorite restaurants are open.

5. UVC Lighting Control for Disinfecting

Smart rooms in hospitals are highly effective at killing viruses with UVC technology that is safe for humans. Among the in-hotel applications of this smart room technology for healthcare, you can sanitize packages and room keys, thus helping your guests feel safer in your hotel.

6. Branded Mobile Apps for Hotels

Letting guests control their hotel experience in an app is one of the best practices for smart rooms. When travelers can find, book, control, and review their stay in one place, you get the source of valuable information to improve your services and apply for marketing activities.

7. Hotel Robots

You can teach robots to bring towels or tea to the smart room, freeing your maids to do other work and increasing their safety thanks to social distance maintenance. Even more, hotel robots can assist people in more sophisticated tasks, like fixing technical errors, noticing poor connectivity, and notifying housekeepers about food shortages.

8. Digital Concierges

This smart room technology is an excellent way to save time on the back end without limiting the guest experience. In hotels, virtual robots and chatbots can handle the most basic inquiries, including answering typical questions about facilities or today’s restaurant menu.

They allow housekeepers to take care of the big things. Also, digital concierges are a great way to help reduce contact with guests without humans having to be there at all.

9. Contactless Tracing

The enhanced safety level of smart meeting rooms includes contactless tracing, meaning an ability to handle safe meetings and events in hotels. Such devices track movements and alert about social distancing problems, improving safety measures for crowd control on site.

10. Contactless Payment

For extra safety, it’s essential to provide your guests with the ability to pay for services without using a touchpoint. In this regard, supporting mobile wallets and providing an option to book a stay in an app are the must-have smart room technologies for hotels these days.

Top 5 Benefits of Smart Room for Owners and Guests

The idea of smart hotels is slowly catching up to and bringing forth all kinds of benefits for owners and guests. Generally, the smart room system introduces the required level of safety and personal control for contemporary travelers. Here’s the list of its top benefits.

1. Higher Security

Smart rooms are equipped with webcams, microphones, speakers, and an intercom system so that owners can see who is at their door without having to open it.

In their turn, guests can easily access their room after entering their personal pin code, without worrying about losing or stealing a key card. Some extra post-COVID safety measures include touchless technologies, maid service delivered by robots, and crowd control.

2. Better Customer Experience

The hotel experience becomes more enjoyable for the guest thanks to an opportunity to create ideal surroundings in one device and before the stay. The result is a more memorable visit with a ‘Wow’-effect and total comfort.

3. Sustainability

Smart rooms address today’s customers’ demand for eco-friendly facilities and services. IoT lighting systems and thermostats provide the next-level optimization of spending resources, bringing sustainability and cost-effectiveness to hotels.

4. Greater Personalization

With smart rooms, you can create a recreational experience that feels like home, thanks to the numerous tools that guests can adjust in a hotel and remotely in advance.

5. Quick Fixes

When something goes wrong in a hotel, full control via IoT devices makes it much easier for owners to detect problems timely and provide accurate technical assistance when needed.

Ask Intellectsoft for Help!

Although it might seem like a new idea, smart rooms are actually becoming increasingly popular around the world, thanks to the large amount of convenience and safety they provide for guests and owners.

And to make the most of hotel room technology, Intellectsoft experts recommend combining it with your existing mobile apps and hotel property management software so that everything works correctly and lets you enjoy all the business benefits of the solution.

If you need assistance with smooth smart room integration, we can help! Intellectsoft has years of experience creating innovative solutions for the hospitality industry. We are ready to apply our knowledge and skills to your business challenge.

In addition to smart hotel rooms, here is the set of extra capabilities you can get with our custom software development for travel and hospitality services:

• Legacy system transformation. We support hospitality modernization in a never-ending journey to streamline its workflow, increase the bottom line, and start creating innovative ways to serve guests.
• Mobile app development. With our help, you can streamline the way you provide amenities for customers and offer everything they need for their stay on a single app.
• Loyalty and reward system development. Build emotional commitments in your customers using our innovative loyalty program.
• Microservers and third-party integration. We help hotels streamline their digital presence by re-engineering their websites in a way that’s easier to maintain.
• Big Data services. With Big Data, you can track your guests’ journeys across your entire hotel – from your marketing efforts to their experiences with your staff and your property – all in real-time.
• Custom software integration. Our software integration with third-party systems for residential and commercial properties allows us to deliver effective solutions so you can use what you already have to maximize your ROI.
• Custom software development solutions. Set up a software solution that’s right for you to respond faster to your guests’ needs.

Contact us to hire a skilled and experienced developer team. Let’s work together and find innovative solutions relevant to you to help improve your business and achieve your goals!

The post Smart Room Technology Overview for Hotel Owners  appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

In 2017, we at Intellectsoft had a customer who asked to make an MVP (“minimum variable product”) on Flutter, a commercial cross-platform app development kit from Google.

The decision to invest in MVP is a common stage in software development, serving as a proof-of-concept and an early app version with the main features included. Our task was to create an MVP to show off to competitors, not accelerate the development process or cut expenses.

Flutter was new to the market, so the app development experienced inevitable challenges. In conversations with the client, we mentioned the rawness of the development language, problems with possible scaling, and lack of tech talents acquainted with this development platform. But the customer still wanted to try.

Unfortunately, all the predicted challenges came to light. The project was hard to scale and lacked the required resources due to low business priority.

For Intellectsoft, the takeaway from this case is straightforward: technology is not an end in itself. The well-built development strategy brings business benefits. And so, the choice between native and cross-platform tools depends on your business aims too.

5 Main Differences of Native vs. Cross-Platform App Development

1. Responsiveness. Since native code accesses the device’s internal resources directly, native apps generally demonstrate better performance.
2. Value-for-money. Cross-platform apps are made faster and cheaper.
3. App stability. In a long run, native apps demonstrate more stability and work well for long-term projects.
4. UI/UX design. Generally, native apps are more attractive and effective in terms of user interface and user experience.
5. Safety. Native app development deals with encrypted and obfuscated infrastructure, while cross-platform apps need extra measures to ensure security.

What Is Native App Development?

This type of app development deals with the platform’s native language and native APIs/frameworks to link to internal functions, meaning Java or Kotlin (with its JDK) for Android and Obj-C or Swift (on its SDK) for iOS.

Thanks to these specifics, native apps provide a better user experience, demonstrate higher performance, and can be personalized. Moreover, access to the devices’ features allows building complex yet stable and secure functionalities.

7 Advantages of Native Development

1. Smooth work. Native technologies connect with the device’s functionality, which makes processing fast and steady.
2. Compatibility. Thanks to seamless integration with hardware, native apps can take photos, track locations, and add events to the calendar.
3. Safety. The minimum of layers and technologies make native apps secure.
4. User experience. In terms of UX design, native apps can have sophisticated layouts, greater personalization, and engaging animations users like.
5. Easy-to-use SDK. For developers, native app building possesses numerous tools that make the process faster and cheaper. In this regard, software development kits are extremely helpful and streamline the development process with up-to-date and mostly ready for implementation parts of code and libraries. In case something is not clear, it’s easy to find and understand the technical guides and official documentation.
6. Optimization. Native apps don’t overload the battery with complex processing, and users can use them longer.
7. Maintenance. Updates like AI, IoT, and adding extra features and easy to implement on native apps.

3 Disadvantages of Native Development

1. Expensive to start. Although native apps possess value-for-money in a long run, the initial cost of their development is high. Each platform requires separate investment, and the development expenses are generally 30-40% higher than going for the cross-platform app development option that covers all the devices at once.
2. Time to market. Native development is complex and requires more attention on each stage, which delays the date when the app is ready to launch.
3. Different codebases. Android and iOS app development are completely different, and the developers need to duplicate each feature by using two separate codebases. Because of this, native app development requires two separate teams at times.

Best Cases of Native Apps

Thanks to its benefits and efficiency indicators, native app development is highly popular these days. You can find native apps among games, messaging platforms, and navigation tools.

Among the loudest examples of native apps, there are:

• Spotify
• Waze
• WhatsApp
• Pokemon Go
• Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg initially invested in a hybrid app, but soon recognized the mistake and build a native version for iOS)

What Is Cross-Platform Development?

You need a single database to build a cross-platform app running on several devices. Due to this advantage of repurposing, the development itself becomes faster and cheaper. The majority of code, meaning 70-95%, can be reused in another platform, which makes building for Android and iOS smooth.

In this regard, React Native, Flutter, Ionic, and Xamarin cover the most tasks for both operating systems. According to Statista, Flutter is the leading framework for cross-platform development, covering 42% of the market. Next is React Native, possessing 38%. The full picture is shown in the table below.

Source: Statista

4 Advantages of Cross-Platform Development

1. Repurposing of code. Cross-platform apps are easy to adapt to multiple devices thanks to 80% of code that can be reused.
2. Cost-effectiveness. Cross-platform development cuts costs and saves time on the development stage, compared to native development.
3. Fewer developers are needed. The development is not complex, so you won’t need to recruit separate teams to build Android and iOS apps.
4. Access to a broader audience. Cross-platform apps are the best option to showcase your app to more people and/or the new market.

4 Disadvantages of Cross-Platform App Development

1. Unstable performance. The general usability of the codebase comes at its cost. The lack of specification sometimes causes delays.
2. Simplified UX. Compared to native apps, some features and layouts are unavailable for cross-platform apps. In this situation, the elaboration on the cross-platform user interface is very important for getting satisfactory results in terms of user experience.
3. Relying on external libraries. As there is almost no support to SDKs, developers can face difficulties in integrating new features.
4. QA is a must. Without several rounds of testing, cross-platform apps are likely to disappoint users with numerous bugs, safety issues, and incompatibilities.

Best Cases of Cross-Platform Apps

Many famous brands go for cross-platform app development when there’s no need to concentrate on a single platform. Among the well-known examples, there are:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• VLC
• Adobe Reader
• OpenOffice

How to Choose between Native and Cross-Platform App Development?

After clarifying the key features and functionality behind each development type, the question of picking the most appropriate one is easier.

Factors to Consider Native Apps:

• Mobile-first service
• Plans to make money with an app
• Strong competitors in the niche
• Your business is big
• Your app is a game
• Your app will have complex features and needs access to the device’s hardware
• You care about top UX

Factors to Consider Cross-Platform Apps:

• Minimal budget for development
• Need to enter both Android and iOS
• Testing ideas
• Quick launch to market
• You are a startup
• You build an MVP with minimum features

The post Native vs. Cross-Platform App Development: How to Pick? appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

At the same time, healthcare practitioners approach innovation differently. Some providers have already started their journey towards incorporating healthcare digital transformation trends, while others are still cautious of their applicability and effectiveness.

Anyway, tomorrow is around the corner, and the best time for smart investment in the future trends in healthcare is now. To help you take in the situation, we describe the most promising forecasts and top tech IT trends for 2022-2025 worth considering and implementing in 2021 in this post.

Future of Healthcare: Statistics

According to The 2022 Hospital Vision Study, we’ll witness the growing use of mobile devices (from 51% in 2017 to 98% in 2022 among physicians and from 42% to 96% among pharmacists) and the emergence of tech-savvy patients (with 77% of respondents feeling positive about clinicians using mobile devices in their care). In this context, the shift towards building mobile-friendly smart healthcare is on-demand for medical providers and patients alike.

This year, the most popular adoption of healthcare technologies are communication platforms, where both sides use mobile apps for secure text messaging (99%), voice conversations (98%), taking pictures of wounds and skin conditions (97%), and voice recognition detection (94%).

However, the list of potential implications is much wider. It includes streamlining hospital operations, relying on the power of data, consumerization of the industry, modernizing infrastructure, advancing care, and many other aspects. They are the basis for developing healthcare trends in 2022.

In general, life sciences remain ready for new possibilities the digital healthcare trends have been bringing since 2017. Some technologies are already widely adopted, while others are still struggling to gain the attention of healthcare practitioners. For the latter type of technologies, certain tools and enhancements have quite strong positions today to shape the nearest future of the industry.

6 Predictions on Healthcare Trends 2022

Digital transformation is the key idea behind all the healthcare IT trends appearing today. In the hospitals that have already adopted a digital-friendly culture, senior managers recognize the effectiveness of investing in technologies and decide to teach medical staff the requisite skills to use them to the maximum.

Because of that, competitiveness and effectiveness in 2022 mean not only knowing the right technologies with true value-for-money but also being ready to lead the change management and make these healthcare technology trends work for your benefit.

In this regard, Deloitte announced 6 main predictions for emerging trends in healthcare:

1. People are more qualified about their health condition. The personal generic profile is no longer a secret for individuals, and they can take a proactive approach to improve their health. Numerous self-checking apps and devices make it possible.
2. Move towards smart healthcare. Increased patient awareness combined with technological enhancement will change the entire healthcare culture. Because of that,  healthcare trends will inevitably include the development of cost-effective patient-centric technologies that will become accessible to a great number of patients.
3. Productivity-centered industrialization of healthcare. The incorporation of lean operating models results in easier fundraising and the appearance of cost-effective tools. On the existing technological basis, hospitals can deploy more enhanced tools (like AI and ML) and scale the reached productivity growth with improved compliance and greater predictability.
4. Data as a new healthcare currency. The development of precision medicine and better predictions on patients’ behavior and reactions are possible thanks to AI and real-world evidence available to healthcare providers. Soon, algorithms can determine all the diagnoses and treatments, making the process free of human mistakes.
5. Exponential advances in life-expanding and precision therapies. Healthcare trends will lead to P4 Medicine (as fully predictive, preventative, personalized, and participatory service) that will revolutionize healthcare. Here, innovative biotechnology is the basis for genomic-driven medicine, enlarging our understanding of possible treatment options.
6. Blurred boundaries between stakeholders. The healthcare landscape will experience significant transformation because of the growing influence of non-traditional healthcare played and the raising self-awareness of patients. As a result, we’ll witness the shift towards customer-focused service, delivered through new partnerships and collaborations.

9 Key Tech Trends in Healthcare for 2022-2025

Based on the above-mentioned predictions, the most promising healthcare trends in the coming years should somehow contribute to building high-tech and patient-centered service delivery future requirements.

We’ve picked 9 most effective virtual healthcare trends for these aims:

1. Telehealth
2. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
3. Medical chatbots
4. Mobile apps
5. Electronic data management
6. Blockchain
7. Cloud computing
8. Digital supply chains
9. Hyper-personalized medicine

Continue reading to get the details on these healthcare trends!

Telehealth

Telehealth technologies have already gained regular approval and clinician support. During the COVID-19 lockdown, virtual communication was a necessity, but today, it’s about to become the norm.

In essence, Telehealth technologies unite numerous software platforms that support voice calls, video conferencing, secure messaging, and comprehensive notification systems. Via online portals, users can establish constant communication with the needed amount of interactions with healthcare practitioners.

In particular, biotelemetry is capable of delivering remote check-ups and patient monitoring. This way, Telehealth as one of the healthcare trends for 2022-2025 saves time and resources for doctors and increases patient engagement. People now can get health-critical medical services in the comfort of their homes.

In the near future, these e-visits will be supplemented with all the necessary components, including using diagnostic tools, making physical examinations, and providing actionable treatment plans. And all this comes without the common inconveniences of traveling to the hospital and losing time in a waiting line.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Together with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), AI establishes the foundation for smart healthcare culture that solves numerous current pain points. The typical areas of AI applications include activities coordination, workflow optimization, doctors’ time management, and paperless documentation.

Moreover, the innovation increases collaborativeness among separate departments, helping doctors, data scientists and bio-scientists deliver patient-centered, accurate, and innovative services together.

As the key enhancement for healthcare organizations, AI algorithms improve the quality and delivery of disease diagnoses, being capable of mining medical records, scanning diagnostic tests results, and augmenting the role of radiologists. This way, the technology enables analyzing and acting upon vast amounts of data that the human brain cannot process fully.

The current applications of AI healthcare trends include:

• AI-assisted robotic surgery, where robots analyze information from medical records to guide surgeons during complex operations
• AI-powered virtual assistants that interact with patients on doctors’ behalf
• Automation of clinical management and workflow
• Medical diagnosis software
• Clinical trial participant identification
• Faster drug discovery and development in the pharma sphere
• Apps for preventing dosage errors
• Brain-computer interfaces that adopt AI for treating brain-related disabilities

Medical Chatbots

As an AI-empowered technology, a medical chatbot is a digital tool that resolves specific industry-related issues, automates healthcare processes, and enhances overall performance. In particular, chatbots collect, digitalize, and encrypt the patient data, assist in refilling and monitoring, provide informational support on requests, schedule appointments, and ensure medical assistance.

Due to its rich functionality for an affordable development cost, medical chatbot technology is about to become a must-have tool faster than other healthcare trends reviewed here.

The main features of a highly efficient medical chatbot are:

• Anonymity, meaning security and comfort of the patient data sharing
• Easy-to-use monitoring tools and templates
• High personalization by using the information on physical indicators and patient behavior
• Real-time interaction
• Scalability

Healthcare practitioners can benefit from this technology with reduced response time, an ability to handle an unlimited number of users and provide accurate medical advice, and an easier scheduling process with automatic reminders and useful templates.

Mobile Apps

Developing a mobile app brings numerous advantages for hospitals, including the rise of client loyalty, increasing the accuracy of patient data, and improving compliance management. Once requested from a reliable vendor, a custom mobile app solution can handle numerous patient-related processes, especially in terms of experience personalization and remote patient monitoring.

Besides, mobile apps are among the most popular trends in healthcare that increase accessibility to medical services on a large scale. When the entire hospital is always available on a smartphone, even people getting in distant areas can get the needed help fast.

Healthcare practitioners requesting mobile app development should check the presence of these features in their solution:

• Secure electronic patients data
• Categorized list of diagnoses
• Treatment protocol templates
• In-app notifications for sending reminders to patients
• Ability to process payments through secure payment getaway
• Online support
• HIPAA-compliant videoconferencing
• Scheduling appointments
• Integration with wearables

Electronic Data Management

Generally, the incorporation of technological healthcare trends lets medical providers significantly improve the accuracy of treatments and their overall productivity.

With a centralized database working with Big Data, it’s also much easier for them to track and maintain patient information. Many hospitals have already experienced the basic benefits of digital medical records, which drives the enhancement of electronic data management further.

More enhanced tools to collect patient data appear. For example, natural language processing (NLP) makes automated writing possible, which leads to the better structurization of information and easier repurposing of the existing narratives for diagnoses and treatment plans.

Even more, the integration of an internal hospital database with third-party data collected from wearables, reports, and authoritative sources unlocks the opportunity to create highly detailed and personalized patient and doctor profiles. This way, the technology brings more transparency and trust in the relations between healthcare providers and the wide patient population.

In general, electronic health data fuels financial and clinical success, being a necessary prerequisite for predictive analytics, real-time clinical support, precision medicine, and proactive treatment.

For future technology adoption, the presence of data scientists in medical institutions is inevitable, as these digital-savvy team members with multidisciplinary expertise will make the change for innovation faster and more efficient. Precisely, they should teach doctors to use analytics so that the investment in electronic records will bring the maximum value.

Blockchain

For the future of digital transformation, safety is a top concern. In this context, as one of the top trends in healthcare, blockchain contributes to the security of data linkages and the overall privacy of electronic information. In particular, the technology provides the needed protection for patient data for effective and safe data-sharing within healthcare organizations.

Even more, many industries and governments collaborate currently on introducing effective regulations and separate “data lakes,” where blockchain is the key technology for ensuring strong ecosystem safety.

Also, blockchain affects the cost of healthcare, successfully handling an overwhelming amount of duplicated data that causes additional storage expenses. In this regard, smart contracts help to eliminate inconsistency with hospital rules and governmental regulations. Being self-executable, they automate the process without the need for management and control.

For healthcare providers, our recommendation for blockchain deployment is to choose the BaaS model and introduce multiple partners, including non-traditional healthcare players, to collaborate on the network building.

Cloud Computing

Migrating data to the cloud is among the leading trends in healthcare and other industries. For the healthcare future, cloud computing serves the mission of data management optimization for a reduced cost. Also, it contributes to establishing a self-sufficient health ecosystem.

The list of benefits cloud computing brings to hospitals includes:

• Ability to draw intelligent insights from data
• Tools for risk mitigation
• Access to the widest perspective possible
• Big Data analytics
• Greater accuracy in decision-making and treatments
• Increased flexibility in reacting to the industry needs
• Transparency of health information
• Cost-effectiveness

On a larger scale, with cloud-based systems, companies can talk to each other and introduce regulators to track their key operations. This way, the technology provides the basis for establishing smart health care communities and digital supply chains, which are one of the most promising healthcare IT trends in 2022-2025.

Digital Supply Chains

Digital transformation will scale in 2022, meaning that technologies will support not only separate activities but entire supply chains. In this regard, the growing popularity of supply chain management software types and cognitive automation tools is remarkable. These healthcare trends can manage huge amounts of data, provide actionable recommendations, and unite all the activities, devices, and software types within and around the hospital under a single digital platform.

In the near future, hospitals will automate numerous standardized processes and use the tools of predictive analytics to conduct market research, forecast demand, and improve the consistency and impact of their services.

For healthcare providers, this trend is beneficial as a driver for productivity growth and decision-making optimization. To achieve these results, the cognitive automation platforms offer an integrated and always-available experience for all the key managers, provide transparent data-driven logic, are flexible in adapting to internal and external changes, possess human-like intelligence, and are designed to be scalable. This way, digital supply chains in healthcare can achieve full agility and increase decision accuracy.

Hyper-Personalized Medicine

As one of the most promising healthcare trends, hyper-personalized medicine is capable of curing diseases that are commonly labeled as “helpless.” In essence, it is the set of digital tools that can work with inherited genetic disorders through making novel drugs.

This treatment is tailored to people’s genes, providing the necessary changes in their structure. The potential of hyper-personalized medicine is already acknowledged by the U.S. government, as it’s expected to receive $3.18 trillion by 2025.

In a broader sense, hyper-personalized medicine means repairing DNAs through genome sequencing and CRISPR engineering methods. This way, the innovation can stabilize the health of patients with genetic mutations, provide timely identification of critical diseases, and personalize the recommendations for healthier lifestyle and treatment plans.

The ability to cure rare diseases is an evident advantage for healthcare practitioners. In the near future, hyper-personalized medicine is about to become more affordable and widespread. In any case, this is a unique tool to help patients struggling with rare disorders today.

How Intellectsoft Can Help you Implement Any Healthcare Technology

Intellectsoft is a leading software development company in the world that unites engineers who possess time-proven expertise in delivering digital solutions for healthcare needs.

Working with Healthcare 4.0 insights-driven approach, we can assist medical providers with automation tools for improving operations efficiency, innovating the existing products, and modernizing the entire infrastructure for a considerable cost.

Here is the list of our healthcare IT solutions and services you can request right now:

• Hospital information systems
• Data engines
• Internet of Medical Things
• Remote medical care
• Health awareness
• Electronic health record

For more details and custom solutions empowered by other technologies, reach our team directly. Let’s build the future of healthcare together!

The post Top Healthcare IT Trends in 2022-2025 appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

Disaster Recovery

Cloud Provider Infrastructure

Cloud providers like Microsoft Azure have these features inside:

• Availability Zone (AZ) — the physical location of the data center and its physical location. The high level of accessibility comes as the result of deployment in different availability zones. The distance between availability zones should be 100 km max.
• Region — the clusters of neighboring data centers with high-speed connectivity. Again, high availability comes as the result of this feature. The distance between regions should be 300 km min.

Because of regions’ peculiarities, the chance of simultaneous outages is minimal. They also have unique identifiers. For example, it can be westeurope (signalizing the West of Europe location) or eastus2 (which means it’s in the east of the U.S.). In terms of the blue-green deployment, “blue” and “green” examples have different region identifiers, which ensures their isolation from each other.

For more details on the features of cloud providers, please read the official documentation.

Azure Front Door

Traffic routing is the key stage of the failover process and blue-green deployment. Frequently, the developers use an option to adjust DNS records for the new users’ needs. But the risk of having a broken instance after the record adjustment remains unsolved in this scenario, increasing the downtime anyway.

Numerous cloud offerings can solve this problem, introducing the abstraction concept between front-facing URLs and backend services. With them, client apps will address the front-facing URLs in any traffic routing scenario. Microsoft Azure is such a solution. For more information, read its official documentation.

Why we chose Azure Front Door (FD) for the solution:

• HTTPS traffic and application-level routing for traffic come right to the API and the asset storage.
• It deals with failover scenarios
• It serves the needs of a global service perfectly.

Here are the FD rules:

• “Blue” and “green” instances are accessed directly
• The system is accessed generically, pointing to “blue” or “green” instances after deployment. This configuration can be changed, enabling routing to the problematic instance in case of disaster recovery.

Here are the ways to route the users during deployment or disaster recovery.

Data Replication

Changing applications and their data require different approaches during deployments and failovers. An app upgrade usually happens by replacing old files with new ones within its set.

But changing data requires a more sophisticated approach, as it’s generated by users on top of the existing application. In case of introducing a new file format to the app, you’ll need to conduct data migration during the deployment.

When it comes to failovers, you need to ensure reliable storage for the existing data. In case of traffic redirection to another app in a different region, you need such storage in both regions at once so that the data serving remains stable in a new region and the system remains up and running after the first region becomes totally down.

The data types used in the system:

• structured data (Azure SQL Database)
• assets (Azure Blob Storage).

To reside data in two regions in parallel, we recommend adopting the replication approach, where changes in the primary location get an automatic reflection in the new one. To get more information on databases, read the official documentation. Also, it’s useful to check out the guide on Azure Blob Storage here.

Failover Switches:

• Primary and secondary instances of Azure Blob Storage and Azure SQL Database
• System’s connection strings to the database and assets storage to include the information to the new primary instances
• The Azure Front Door rule for another instance.

During outrages, the Powershell script is the tool that enables the sequence of these actions. If the system’s lifetime is around a year, no records on outrage occurrences are available. That’s why having a working and well-tested failover procedure is the key mission-critical element for the system.

Security

Azure Active Directory

Modern systems frequently face user credentials storage problems, and their third-party solutions are sophisticated and costly (like introducing passwordless login, multi-factor authentication, etc). However, they introduce the Single-Sign-On scenario, which works well for a one-entry user experience of logging in once and getting access to the entire systems set.

Azure Active Directory is such a set of systems that can be leveraged by a sole Azure Portal. Besides, it doesn’t keep any user’s credentials, as admin access manages this information too.

Secrets Management

Secret is the apps’ compilation of sensitive information for getting access to external API, database, or any other credentials-storing service. Using Vaults helps here: the system with Microsoft Azure hosting can adopt Azure Key Vault service for satisfactory data security.

In the beginning, the system doesn’t store sensitive information in the repository but simply reads it from the Key Vault. Only selected people have permission to read and write secrets after proving to the client the need to request some keys from the third-party services. For more details on how Azure Key Vault works, read its official documentation.

Managed Service Identity

After Key Vault setup, the system can access its secrets. In case several users get permission to get the API key from the repository, they will have the same access levels to Secrets Management by default. For identity “personalization,” Microsoft Azure has an option to create the Managed Service Identity. Read more about this feature in the official documentation.

As for the next steps, you can assign the Azure App Service identity so that the system gets full access to the secrets, with no need for storing extra credentials in the code repository anymore.

Web Application Firewall

The remaining security element to review is Azure WAF. Same as for the previous elements, adopting ready-made systems is the best practice in this case. The greatest advantage is stable defense in front of the most frequent cyber-attacks — and with the real value-for-money.

In technical terms, a pre-configured WAF instance analyzes the system traffic that comes through the Azure Front Door. It checks and automatically blocks suspicious requests, without the need for extra coding. The service possesses a set of rules that follow the security standards (like OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities), upon which you can build your own custom rules for certain patterns.

A blocked request comes as the result of WAF-verification failure. In this case, a user sees a 403 error, which prevents the system overload and minimizes the possible damage in the case of an emergency. For more information about Azure WAF, check out the official documentation.

Business Advantages

With all the above-mentioned technical enhancements, the company gets the working tools to quickly react to the market changes and remain stable.

New entries and data processing operations we’ve described significantly facilitate data management and analysis, providing you with the needed level of control over your IT infrastructure. The data inputs come quickly, the updates happen automatically, and notifications to all the stakeholders are sent instantly.

In a long run, this investment enables establishing a proactive approach to serving clients and improving the quality of your data-driven decisions. And all this comes for fewer man-hours and with the real enhancements in the bottom line!

The post How to Create Custom Software for Financial Analytics: Intellectsoft Experience (Part 2) appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

That’s the challenge Intellectsoft accepted to build a tailor-made software solution. For a leading world’s investment fund, we’ve made an Infrastructure as a Code platform with financial analytics tools like blue-green deployment and constant delivery.

While building a solution for financial data analytics, software providers should recognize the uniqueness of each tech task, ensuring the presence of required functionality and security features. In this financial analytics solution challenge, we had to include disaster recovery, information replication, managed service identity, web app firewall, along with other features.

Among other factors, the platform type affects the number of features, and we adopted the appearance of the solution to Microsoft Azure Cloud in this case.

Obviously, this platform is not the only option to deliver the required functionality — Google Cloud also works for disaster recovery, for example — but Microsoft Azure Cloud, as a fully managed cloud, worked better to address the existing business performance challenges, safety requirements, and compliance needs.

This choice was also good for our developers, helping them to accelerate the deployment, hosting, and scaling of the system and its functionalities and APIs.

What’s Inside the App Box?

The financial analytics app we’ve built addresses the need for accessible data analytics that works with information from multiple sources. The solution visualizes the results in an easy-to-use way, meaning generating various graphs, diagrams, tables, and images. Also, the app enables sharing reports with stakeholders as Excel files.

The software takes over numerous tasks analysts struggle with once do them manually. The list includes working with files, filling spreadsheets, unifying the results, and drawing actionable insights. The machine supports all these processes to facilitate the work for specialists.

Even more, the custom app automates the majority of data processing after its development completion. This way, the owner got the opportunity to save time and nerves on managing the project, as employees can see the assigned tasks and distribute the key data in the Excel file format right in the system.

The inclusion of historical records also enabled conducting truly in-depth research, taking into account the variety of users and responsible roles, along with data consistency.

Challenges

Intellectsoft considers the specifics of existing IT infrastructure while building digital solutions. For this financial data analytics challenge, we conducted all-around research for accurate project scope determination. We chose Microsoft Azure Cloud as the platform that facilitates hosting for upcoming integrations, especially over the long haul.

Services Included:

• Azure App Service (API hosting)
• Azure SQL Databases (data structure)
• Azure Storage (assets storage)
• Azure Storage (static website hosting that works for web apps based on the SPA approach and React.js technology)
• Security services, routing, and other functionalities (more details below).

Azure Pipelines

For the inclusion of the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) concept, Azure Pipelines work the best. Being an integral part DevOps system, these platforms provide the space for numerous exceptional features and utilities, making data analytics in finance usable, efficient, and truly reliable.

For instance, Azure Pipelines support several pipelines and manual approvals, eliminating the great number of human errors. The platforms enable maximum automation for all the processes and operations  — wherever possible.

Hosting & Data Storage

Frequently, software systems struggle with network bandwidth and poor app performance. In this regard, the ability to access files in Azure Blob Storage directly, thanks to the presence of the shared access signatures (SAS), creates the basis for reliable file storage. Check out all the technical details in the official documentation — or review our overview of the essence of this approach below:

• The file is a must for client application
• To download this file, the client application needs to send the request to the API
• In its turn, API validates the request, considering permissions and other relevant perspectives
• Once approved, API creates the SAS and sends the direct URL with the SAS back in a file
• The client application uses the URL, enters Azure Blob Storage, and downloads the file

(Software) Engineering

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Concept

The essence of the CI/CD concept is “built once and deployed everywhere,” which means that it’s possible to use various environments to deploy the revisions from every single VCS branch.

The greatest advantage of this approach is the development process acceleration. What’s more, the project becomes more predictable, as each building process generates an immutable artifact that is ready for deployment in development, testing, UAT, and production environments. The artifact contains all the needed information (like built code, dependencies, assets, etc) inside.

Once the artifact passes the deployment process (CD), it experiences changes in its environment-specific configuration settings. With the new configuration values, it enters the cloud right away, without extra verifications of the system.

It’s possible since the unification of environments eliminates the need for top-level checks. Because of this, everything works even if a developer decides to download the artifact on a local PC. Simply put, there is no “works on machine” problem, and the app version will be the same in any environment.

Infrastructure as a Code

Making a financial analytics app requires developing an infrastructure. As the system evolves, its infrastructural elements and configurations change but the codebase remains the same. In this process, missing or wrong configurations are quite common, causing problems for the system’s performance in the live environment.

Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) is the solution to these development and deployment problems. In this infrastructure type, cloud resources get code descriptions and storage place in VCS — as if they are the parts of a system code. When the time for deployment comes, the deployment pipeline conducts the needed changes and creates code for additional cloud resources that appeared during the development stage.

Then, the app is moved to the new resource, following the same scenario for deleted resources or renewed configurations. Everything unnecessary automatically goes to the bin, and everything important will be reconfigured. IaC is stored in the VCS, which means preserving version records and code reviews.

IaC adopts various technologies: Azure CLI, Azure Resource Manager (ARM), Pulumi, Terraform. In this list, Terraform serves the system requirements most accurately, gaining popularity thanks to multi-cloud (and beyond-cloud) support.

The presence of Terraform code both in the VCS and the deployment pipeline lets the developers work without the production infrastructure itself. Even more, the common problems, drawbacks, and troubleshooting processes won’t bother.

Blue-Green Deployment

Having everything automated doesn’t eliminate the possibility to make a mistake completely. This app code can cause severe problems to the business — especially if they appear in the core system components.

That’s why we supported the release with the Blue-Green approach to deployment. For this, we created two distinct app versions that run simultaneously in two instances (the production itself and the production candidate). This is how the development itself happened under this scenario:

• Production candidate environment gets a new version for deployment
• We checking the production candidate for issues
• Routing traffic (real users) is reverted from the production itself to the production candidate
• Changing the environments for the production itself and the production candidate.
• After shifting the roles, the next deployment stage starts.

In practice, people don’t use “production itself” and “production candidate” terms, but simply call them “blue” (for production one) and “green” (for production candidate). After the new deployment stage, the titles will change: “green” will become the “production one”, and “blue” turns into the “production candidate.”

There is one more reason behind working in two environments, referring to the recovery process and failover from the Azure outages. We’ll describe the details in the next part of this article.

The post How to Create Custom Software for Financial Analytics: Intellectsoft Experience (Part 1) appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

In essence, such systems contribute to the business success by increasing ROI through advanced tracking instruments for small equipment. The software introduces a centralized approach to equipment management, letting you get control over and simplify management.

Simply put, you get an easy-to-access location for all the essential historical data relevant for your small equipment and key assets.

The innovative equipment management instrument not only assists in managing operations but also provides the needed information for prevention and scheduling.

Because of this, it’s possible to apply this solution to the different spheres of your equipment management. For example, you can:

• Create and manage profiles for each equipment type and corporate asset;
• Check the current condition of small equipment with photos, videos, and certificates attached;
• Use automation tools to schedule and plan typical operations and processes.

Simply put, equipment management solutions are the custom platforms that provide a required setup for asset administration and serve as a background for business profitability. Given the strong advantages they promise, the services are applicable to many business sectors, including the construction industry.

How Are  Equipment Management Solutions Used in the Construction Industry?

Maintenance of construction equipment is easier with the software. That’s why the key application of construction equipment management software these days is to monitor the entire operations, streamlining all the maintenance management system processes.

The exact list of actions includes scheduling, preventive management operations, task assignment, work progress, and asset management. This way, the software carefully records all equipment-specific details and provides the platform for making accurate decisions over the data.

What Are the Possible Benefits of Such Software Type?

In general, equipment management systems can be applied to numerous sectors, and their list of pros is huge, involving fleet performance improvement and coping with the bottle line. Other distinct advantages of such software type include:

• Fueling team participation through various procedures and tools
• Getting a document management system
• Mastering scheduling instruments
• Introducing employee engagement platforms
• Enhanced asset tracking

In this section, we’ve gathered several striking software benefits that are relevant for the construction industry specifically.

Managing Small Equipment

Traditionally, the construction sector deals with numerous types of equipment and vehicles, and taking an eye on everything can be overwhelming, especially in crises. In this regard, the equipment management system can take over tracking and notify about relevant changes in small equipment in real-time.

Storing Information

Being a cloud-based solution, the equipment management system keeps all the small equipment data in one place. This makes the life of decision makers easier: you can react fast and monitor changes timely with an organized data set. Correspondingly, the accuracy, safety, and performance of your decisions increase.

Digital Inspections

As a separate solution, inspection management software provides better planning, process accuracy, training platforms for inspectors, and accelerated operations for the construction industry.

With construction equipment management software, you can also free your time from handling inspections manually. This technology effectively copes with equipment issues, and you can get instant notifications, see the exact location, and take the action needed fast.

We recommend going for custom equipment management technology solutions. In this case, you’ll get an even more accurate instrument for your industry- and company-specific inspection management, designed for your corporate needs particularly.

Better Collaboration

With software for construction equipment management, your company gets the platform that significantly facilitates communication within teams. This task management instrument lets project managers assign and control order progress and get instant feedback from the performers.

Even more, solutions for construction equipment management contain the function of preventive maintenance scheduling that allows taking a proactive approach in assigning tasks and relying on automated reminders.

All these features address the main challenges for construction project management, given that most construction projects fail due to miscommunication, which leads to violated deadlines and the need for an extended budget.

What Are the Most Required Features of the Construction Equipment Management Solutions?

Building an effective equipment management solution always depends on the exact business needs because it considers the enormous impact of the solution application on business performance and profitability. However, there are some minor technological features and must-have modules that each construction equipment management program should have.

Here they are:

1. Budgeting tools. Construction equipment management deals with controlling and monitoring costs on a daily basis. That’s why your software solution should have high-level metrics and configurable reports, at least, to address this need.
2. Maintenance manager. This module is needed to manage work orders, meaning planning, assignment, and checking the progress.
3. Inspection tool. Mobile inspections should include all the necessary checklists, an auditing suite, and assignment tools.
4. Equipment tracker. The construction equipment management software should let you track and manage assets relevant to your corporate product life cycle.
5. Maintenance tickets. This feature means an ability to create integrated digital tickets for each equipment and asset piece.
6. Notifications. Managers and team members should be able to send alerts for more effective communication. In this regard, notifications can be automatic (or instant) and escalated (scheduled for future actions).
7. Reports. This feature in equipment management solutions is essential for a real understanding of what’s going on in your construction company and accurate decision-making.

How Can Intellectsoft Develop Your Custom Feature-Rich Construction Equipment Management Solution?

Intellectsoft experts are experienced in building customized solutions for companies that address their exact business needs. And our construction management equipment services are not an exception.

In a tailored solution, you can request any feature you find relevant for your construction company, and our developers will enrich your list of business requirements with an enhanced set of technologies and features.

For example, suppose your business lacks inspection scheduling. In this case, we can make an online form for your inspectors to set tasks, link them to the specific equipment types, determine completion frequency, and pick the specialists who will perform the task.

Alternatively, a construction equipment fleet management tool will have more features, providing relevant technologies and online forms on each product lifecycle stage.

The choice is all yours!

From Intellectsoft, you can order different customized services for construction software development, including:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for centralization and management of the construction project’s lifecycle as a whole.
• Project Management, or an advanced project management system for planning and streamlining operations at all levels.
• Inspection Management as the module for conducting, assigning, tracking, and completing inspections.
• Customer Portal & Partner Portal that lets you strengthen your customer and partner relations in an equipment management solution.
• Construction Integrations that work with third-data sources for better decision accuracy.
• Analytics & Reporting that harmonizes various data points for business results improvement.
• Project Onboarding and Training that lets you simplify the onboarding process and training activities.

Any of these technologies and modules can become an integral part of your construction equipment management solution. All you need is to contact us now and discuss the details!

The post Why Each Construction Site Needs Equipment Management Solutions appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

Nevertheless, the situation has changed in recent years.

The rising speed and affordability of digital dental solutions fuel the extent of dental transformation.

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the key achievements and best practices of dental digital transformation.

Digital Dentistry: How Modern Software Can Revolutionize the Dental Industry

In technological terms, dental transformation means implementing innovative tools to increase service quality and improve customer experience in the dental sphere. These days, digital dentistry unites several tendencies that aim at enhancing the industrial capacities in these dimensions.

7 Main Trends of Digital Dental Transformation

1. Consolidation. The industry players recognize the importance of building chains and strong relationships to improve their investment capabilities and start applying integrated workflow solutions.
2. Better solutions. The quality of entry-level solutions is in the spotlight these days. Industry players are searching for ways to ensure adequate quality of affordable and commoditized services.
3. Software development. After reaching the affordability of computer software and prosthetics production, the future of dentistry technology is connected with AI and ML solutions.
4. Optimizing customer experience. Customer demands change with time. Since digital dental solutions minimize the time and effort on treatment, industry players are looking for new possibilities of advanced aesthetic and orthodontic treatments.
5. Changes in dental education. Current technologies transform dental school curricula, as a professional dentist should master advanced hardware and software these days.
6. New standards. Technology digitalizes the dentists’ work, and the industry standards adjust to the new reality.
7. Digital-savvy specialists. Further technological development changes the requirements for new personnel.

The Software Potential for Dental Specialists

The main set of digital dental benefits addresses service quality, resource management, and labor cost reductions. However, these advantages go far beyond the limits of a given clinic. Potentially, digital dental solutions can improve overall industrial efficiency and help overcome personnel shortages in entire countries.

This way, digital transformation can cover the dental workflow as a whole.

5 Key Software Benefits for Digital Dentistry:

1. Ability to digitally replicate the entire operations. Digital dental services bring tremendous positive effect on the industry as a whole. With the capabilities of dental digital transformation, the innovation offers a set of tools that address professional needs on any stage and level.
2. Greater personalization. The digital dental capabilities enable improvements in customer experience, meaning easier access and safe storage of personal data. As most industries have proved, the personalization of data is the foundation for delivering a highly relevant and omnichannel experience.
3. Ability to make more accurate diagnoses. Software increases the service quality, starting from precise determination of health problems to designing better treatment plans.
4. Better patient-dentist communication. The technologies enable customers to be fully involved in their patient journey, being informed and aware of each stage in their treatment plan. These factors increase patient loyalty and the level of customer satisfaction.
5. Cost-effectiveness. Dental digital transformation has a positive impact on time savings and labor cost reductions. Enabling the shift from manual processing towards automation minimizes production and treatment time and significantly shortens treatment times.

Examples of Digital Dental Solutions Specialists Can Already Use

Although the real digital transformation for dentistry is still in the making, various software types already fuel the extent of dental transformation. In this overview, we’ll explain the main enhancements in this list.

Electronic Dental Records

Electronic medical records appear to be the best optimization tool when it comes to adjusting workflow in a dental clinic. In essence, this technology enables creating, managing, and storing patients’ data as electronic patient records. This way, the dental clinic can safely store and quickly share health information within the organization or across multiple healthcare settings.

The best practice of electronic dental records implementation covers the following steps:

1. Prior assessment of practice state, aims, and objectives.
2. Creating a business plan that reveals the awareness of dental practice workflow and effectiveness.
3. Setting partnership with a tech vendor by making an informed decision about solution architects.
4. Create an implementation plan that considers all the business objectives, standards, and legal requirements.
5. Work in close cooperation with a tech vendor and communicate on each development stage.
6. Test the digital solution and fix bugs and mistakes.
7. Go live and work on the solution’s maintenance and adjustment.

As for the most important benefit, electronic dental records can enhance patient information accuracy and processing speed, which improves patient care quality and safety in return. The improved efficiency also refers to accurate scheduling of operatories, wise allocation of human resources, and relevant treatment planning.

Patient Management Software

Establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships between dentists and patients is the key to customer loyalty and clinic profitability. In this regard, patient management software offers the set of tools and solutions that make this strong bond happen.

For example, patient scheduling software serves as the system that adopts virtual care, robotic surgery, AI, biosensors, and drones of prescriptions formulation and delivery. In particular, the technology is capable of these improvements:

• Optimized administrative workflow;
• Reduced number of empty slots;
• Reminders about the scheduled visits;
• Patient waiting list creation;
• Personal health information privatizing and encryption;
• Customized care plans;
• Wearable and mobile devices integration;
• Patient self-scheduling function.

This way, the patient management solutions are the tools for increasing revenue through access to the detailed statistics that can serve as the solid background for strategizing and normalizing relationships with patients.

Dental Practice Management Software

This technology provides the tools dentists can use for overseeing their daily operations. The typical set of features includes appointment arrangement, storing essential patient data, leading document correspondence with patients, and daily task tracking. To address these functionality requirements, the extended list of features for orthodontic practice management software includes:

• Arranging and flexibly editing photographs and X-ray images;
• Making automated intraoral records;
• Integrated word processing;
• Treatment plan tools, including slideshow viewer, overlay feature, and movie player;
• Analysis and planner modules;
• Visual representation of the expected outcome.

If you’re interested in getting dental practice management software, check this blog post to learn about key development tools and implementation pitfalls.

Dental Office Management Software

This set of software solutions is aimed at optimizing dental clinic workflow as the set of business functions. The technology deals with appointment scheduling, charting, billing, customer communications, payment processing, and social activities. All in all, the solution creates the foundation for a paperless office.

The basic package of features for dental office management software includes:

1. HIPAA compliance: This international standard ensures the strong security of patient data.
2. Easy-to-use interface: The staff should access and work with the software quickly and effortlessly.
3. Intuitive dashboards: Each software screen should provide easy access to information, record new data points, and provide understandable visualization.
4. Analytics: This module provides the basis for better and faster decisions, collecting statistical data and looking for tendencies and causal relationships in them.
5. Automation: The tool should be capable of automating repetitive tasks to let your personnel concentrate on strategic things.
6. Integration: All the modules in the system should work together, and the dental office management software itself requires proper implementation in the existing computing environment of your clinic.
7. Payment processing: The software should have a clear subscription model, and the tech vendor should work on a safe payment gateway.

Once implemented wisely, a dental office management solution can cover most of the functions taking place in your clinic.

Request Digital Dental Solutions from Intellectsoft

Let our expertise in the dental industry serve the needs of your dental clinic! Contact Intellectsoft experts now, and we’ll build the best-fit software solution to overcome all the challenges on the way to dental digital transformation.

The post Digital Dental Transformation: Core Trends, Benefits, and Best Use Cases appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

According to a recent report by Deloitte, over 75% of the GPs and practice nurses have tried or already implemented this digital solution in their daily practices.

And that’s not a surprise, since e-prescription software is the advanced solution targeted at minimizing medical errors in healthcare and upgrading the traditional prescription process to a new level.

E-prescribing or eRx software enables the prescription delivery from a doctor to the pharmacist, hospital administrator, or insurer accurately, quickly, and effortlessly.

In this article, we’ll uncover what e-prescription software is, its potential, benefits, and critical features that make it a must-use technology for the healthcare industry. Also, you’ll be able to discover the potential challenges while creating the eRx software and how to resolve them effectively.

What Is E-Prescribing Software?

The e-prescribing software is an easy-to-use yet customizable digital system that enables quick, simple, and effective drug prescribing.

Additionally, it assists in finding critical medical information about any kind of drugs, creating and sending the prescriptions in just a few clicks.

The main goal of this healthcare technology is to enhance the current prescription process that can help to minimize medication errors with the standalone software solution.

The electronic prescribing software has plenty of useful features targeted on a quick yet effective drug prescribing, that can be used on different devices anytime and from anywhere.

Meanwhile, the software agility allows its easy integration with the other popular healthcare systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems.

With the eRx software implementation, it’s possible to eliminate the causes of medication errors and reduce the spendings on their coverage. For instance, the US can save up on medication error spendings that now has reached $40 billion per year. Impressive, isn’t it?

Last but not least, there are lots of different types of e-prescription software depending on the scopes they’re used in. For instance, you can now meet this technology in the e-prescribing software for dentists, or else e-prescribing software for physicians, etc.

With the specific features of each field, this software offers a wide range of useful e-prescribing tools for effective yet quick drug orders.

The Main Advantages of E-Prescription Software

Having uncovered what e-prescribing software is, it’s essential to find out the major benefits this type of software can bring to your organization. Here, we will analyze the most critical advantages of the eRx software that can help improve your current business performance.

Enables the Paperless Prescription Management

Due to the system versatility and advanced performance, the e-prescribing software can significantly enhance the office workflow with digital data management.

It allows simplifying the paperwork, quickly accessing any drug information and patient’s electronic health records, effective medical data sharing, seamless integration with other systems, and more.

With all these tasks digitized and optimized, the healthcare providers can achieve much better performance and advanced management of the key workflow processes, and also enhance the quality of their medical services for patients as well.

Offers a Real-Time Prescription

It also enables reviewing the patient prescription history from Pharmacies and PBM/Payers in real-time, which means medical staff won’t spend tons of their time reviewing the paper archives.

Additionally, they can ensure they’ve covered all the critical patient information and prescribe the drugs that work best for their specific health condition.

Meanwhile, the medical staff gets full access to the integrated drug reference library, which minimizes the possibility of medication errors.

Increases Treatment Safety

One of the core advantages of using electronic prescription systems is their ability to decrease the errors that occurred as a result of handwriting illegibility and misinterpretation.

The patient is more secured from the medication errors by the real-time interaction checking with user-customizable alert levels.

For instance, the system can check the compatibility of different types of drugs, the possible allergies, and the drug’s impact on the existing diseases (if there are any)

With the drug reference libraries, the patients can get advanced information of the treatment process, including the details regarding:

• general warnings
• pregnancy
• lactation
• side effects
• usage monographs
• dosing monographs
• compatibility with foods and more

All these advantages have proven the fact that electronic prescription software is an advanced solution that is important not only for healthcare organizations but for their patients as well. With this digital set of tools implemented, the medical institutions can minimize the possible medication issues and also enhance the quality of their services and their working performance as well.

What Are the Integral Features of E-Prescription Software?

Needless to say, the effective yet cost-efficient approach to implementing electronic prescription software in the healthcare organization is developing your own digital solution. However, the e-prescribing software cost is directly linked to the features you want to get with this technology.

That is why the best practices of developing any type of medicare software recommend creating a list of all the must-have features of the electronic prescription systems.

This way you’ll ensure the effective spending of your investments and set up the clear requirements for developing your individual e-prescription software.

So, what features should you include when developing electronic prescription systems?

• Electronic prescriptions sending. Make sure the software is connected with the nationwide prescription network so that you can immediately send the prescriptions to any pharmacies online.
• The immediate e-send response from pharmacies. Reduce the time needed to ask for the drug availability and the locations where the patients can receive it.
• Advanced drug search. Add the searching by name, nickname, generic, brand, Rx OTC, class, or any other common indications to enable quick yet effective drug ordering.
• E-refill: A great feature that enables effortless review and immediate response to any of the refill requests (like one-click refills or one-click new Rx creation).
• E-cancellation. E prescribing software for pharmacies should also send the order cancellations and updates.
• Creating premade lists for each patient. Allows issuing the prescription in one just a click, thus minimizing the time needed for the drug prescribing.
• Device-friendly interface. Make sure the e-prescription software is available for use on any device, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and all major browsers to ensure the medical staff can effortlessly access the system using the most convenient methods.
• Dosing calculator. A critical tool for a fast calculation of the drug dose based on the patient’s specific health characteristics like weight or diseases.
• Digital solution to the non-electronic pharmacies. To increase the versatility of your system, including the conversion of the e-send prescriptions to fax or any other methods available (for instance, message, email, letter, or phone notification).
• Intrahospital staff communication. Instead of paper-based systems, it’s more resource-effective to use digital communication when the medical staff needs consultation of other specialists when prescribing drugs for specific disease cases.
• Clinical decision support. To make the most of the digital treatment recommendations, it’s important to implement rule-based or AI-based programs that can automatically warn medical staff about the specific health characteristics that can impact the drug prescription (like pregnancy, allergies, drug to drug or drug to food compatibility and more)

With these simple yet effective tools added to your electronic prescribing software, your organization will get a powerful solution for providing convenient, effective yet feature-rich services to patients.

Common Mistakes When Developing a Custom E-Prescription Software

Along with the key features to include in your electronic prescribing software, there are some critical mistakes developers should avoid following the HIPAA requirements.

In fact, even the incorrect data storage that lots of organizations manipulate to reduce the e-prescribing software cost can result in millions of dollars lost.

Here are the most common mistakes to keep in mind to prevent HIPAA rules violations:

• Deleting or copying the electronic physical health information (ePHI) from a healthcare facility — this practice can easily result in medical data loss, and also is a serious violation of the law.
• The inappropriate ePHI access control — the medical staff should operate only with the accessible data of their patients. This leads to a high possibility of a data breach, and the accidents of sharing private patient information with third parties.
• Incorrect storage period of electronic healthcare records — though HIPAA doesn’t specify the exact time of the information storage, it’s still critical to take into consideration the local law requirements regarding the information storage to prevent violations.
• The inability to obtain health information per patient’s request — the developers should enable the option of accessing their personal health data by patients. But also, mind the patient identification, since it can result in a serious HIPAA violation as well.
• Vulnerability of the data storage — any storage media (no matter if it’s electronic or paper) must be protected 24/7, according to the HIPAA rules. That is why make sure to include the passwords or a biometric verification system in your e-prescribing software.

Conclusion

As you can see, electronic prescription software has already become an integral medical technology of healthcare organizations throughout the world.

By implementing the innovative healthcare IT solutions and software services, it is now possible to enhance the quality of the fundamental medicare services, improve the workflow of the healthcare institutions and enable performing the successful treatment processes which result in a better patient conversion.

Our top-rated developers know how essential it is to implement innovative technologies and the latest approaches for healthcare companies and their workforces. That is why we’re always researching for the best technologies that perfectly fit right to the specific needs and goals of each organization.

Are you looking for assistance in developing your next digital project?

Contact our experts right now to uncover the essential information about the eRx software, summarizing the e-prescribing software cost and how this technology can benefit your business today!

The post How to Build an E-prescription Software appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

At the same time, the aspects of use for this type of technology are different.

Due to Delloite’s report “The future of AI in healthcare”, chatbots, as one of the essential digital assistants in healthcare, can be used in the scope of patient-oriented AI, clinician-oriented AI administrative, and operational-oriented AI.

Today, the Intellectsoft experts uncover what is medical chatbot technology and its potential for the healthcare industry development.

What Is Chatbot Technology in Healthcare?

A medical chatbot, also known as a healthcare chatbot, stands for the AI technology in the health industry targeted on resolving the specific problems and issues within that industry, with the ability to automate the key processes in healthcare and enhancing the overall industry performance as well. The most common healthcare chatbot use cases can be categorized as follows:

• Collecting the patient data, its digitalization, and encryption
• Assistance in refilling and monitoring
• Providing the informational support
• Scheduling the appointments
• Ensuring the medical assistance

As you can see, today’s chatbots play an exceptional role in healthcare, since they help to reduce the paperwork, optimize numerous processes in this industry, offer diagnosis to symptoms, conduct mental health consultations, assist in nutrition informing and tracking, and more.

With all these processes eliminated by AI technology, healthcare chatbot solutions benefit the medical staff, health institutions, and, of course, patients in different stages of interaction with the previous two.

The most remarkable case of use of chatbots in healthcare is the collaboration of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Whatsapp in 2020 with launching the specific chatbot messaging to keep people informed about the COVID-19 latest insights including details on symptoms, preventing measures, etc.

Medical Chatbots: What Features are Really Important for Healthcare?

Now that we know what medical chatbots are and how they can be used within healthcare. However, is a chatbot healthcare technology a must-have for the current industry? In fact, it is.

The most beneficial features of chatbots in healthcare include:

#1 Anonymity

This is one of the core factors of the healthcare system, as it’s the duty of the institutions from any niche to make their patients feel secure and comfortable when sharing their data.

This will not only benefit the clients’ sensitive data protection but also allow the healthcare and pharma industry to support various medical researches and drug discoveries. This can be achieved by:

• Strongly investing in data security of chatbots
• Providing the patients with a choice of data sharing
• Detailed information of the data sharing basics

#2 Monitoring

Another important aspect chatbots can optimize is to track, analyze and inform users about health changes, physical activities and weight changes, mental health monitoring, and others. Furthermore, these processes are fully automated and update each time patients input the new data to their profiles.

This way medical staff can better understand and record the health situation of each patient, as well as inform them about the health checkups and preventive measures to improve the immune system.

#3 Personalization

With having enough health-related information recorded about each patient, chatbots are able to establish better communication with clients as well as be used for different purposes. For example, some of the chatbot applications can analyze the specific measurements of:

• Physical indicators, such as oxygenation, heart rhythm, blood pressure, or body measurements (using the mobile sensors)
• Patient behavior (using facial recognition)

#4 Real-Time Interaction

This feature implies minimizing the overall time needed to respond to a patient’s request and successfully perform the standard administrative tasks, for instance, scheduling an appointment. Additionally, real-time interaction covers sending different notifications and reminders for patients, which is much more time-effective than manually sending personal emails.

#5 Scalability

Last but not least an important feature of chatbots in healthcare is the ability to simultaneously interact with numerous patients. Unlike the traditional 1-in-1 personal online consultation, emailing or calls, chatbot healthcare technology allows easy and effective optimization of the communication between the healthcare institution and its patients.

The Advantages of Chatbots for Healthcare

According to the recent report by PwC, the segment of the Intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) market, an important part of which is related to chatbots, was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and this number will only rise in the future.

Why? There are different growth drivers for this reason. One of the key aspects of it is the increasing use of IVAs in the healthcare sector for patient management and doctor assistance, and also the conversational AI technologies, that are greatly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak.

But what exactly can medical institutions expect from employing chatbots in the healthcare industry? Here are the main advantages of health chatbot to know:

• Reduced time for response. Chatbots can enhance getting the instant answer to a question, which especially matters for medical situations
• Handling the unlimited number of users. Chatbots can effectively operate the same service tasks much faster and more resource-effectively, no matter how many patients you need to serve.
• Timely medical advice. In the healthcare industry, time is of the essence, and it often happens that patients need immediate medical advice on the steps to do next, especially in the life-threatening situations
• Daily reminders and notifications. Chatbot technology enables constant tracking of health conditions by sending the scheduled reminders when patients need to take medications according to the doctor’s recommendations.
• Scheduling the appointments. Medical chatbots can act as personal medical assistants and, for instance, be programmed on scheduling the doctor’s appointments or reminding about the upcoming consultations.
• Large cost savings. From the business point of view, health chatbots can significantly reduce labor expenses by optimizing the entire workflow, as well as reducing the workload of healthcare institutions.
• Automated billing and payments. Chatbot technology can also enhance the medical billing processes by automating such processes as invoice sending, payment tracking and costs collecting right after the patient meets their doctor.

All these extremely important aspects can greatly enhance your business performance in the healthcare industry. And our best developers at Intellectsoft can cover them all in creating a brand new chatbot that is fully consistent with your business needs and goals within the industry!

Summing It Up

As you can see, chatbots in healthcare are one of the must-have AI technologies for this industry. Its implementation can benefit workflow boosting and the effective use of critical resources: time, labor, costs, and others.

At the same time, these healthcare IT solutions and software services can significantly reduce the workload of healthcare institutions and improve their services, which is both important for the healthcare industry, its workers, and patients as well.

We, at Intellectsoft, know how important it is for healthcare companies and their workforces to employ innovative solutions and approaches. Our team of dedicated developers is here to assist in this process. 

Contact Intellectsoft and discover more about the chatbots in healthcare, and how your business can start benefiting from them today!

The post Medical Chatbot as the Main Trend in the Healthcare Industry appeared first on Intellectsoft Blog.

At the same time, meeting the tendency requires careful consideration. According to Deloitte 2021 Retail Industry Outlook, only 23% of consumers think the industry is trustworthy in terms of safety, and only 5% ranked it as a top-three one for data privacy. That means the importance of finding a reliable tech partner and using safe technologies for digitalization.

What’s more, eCommerce customers prefer to interact with online shops via smartphones. The mobile traffic surpasses all other types, reaching 54.8% of global website traffic in the first quarter of 2021. This situation calls for investing in mobile apps, but the cost of this type of app development isn’t affordable for any eCommerce business.

That’s why industry players have started searching for reliable technology to address the industry and customer demands. In this regard, progressive web apps attract wide attention.

These affordable platforms combine the latest web functionality with a native app-like experience, letting businesses take the desired advantage of the service.

In this overview, we’ll describe what good brings this type of eCommerce web development and explain why it’s worth a try.

What Is Progressive Web App (PWA)?

A progressive web app is a technology that unites the best parts of mobile apps and mobile websites. In practice, it lets customers open your app in a web browser and interact with it as if it’s a native app installed on their smartphones.

By resembling mobile apps as so, these platforms don’t require such a heavy investment and numerous complicated development stages.

Google introduced the progressive web app technology in 2015. These days, the search engine giant still supports PWA web pages. It lets your clients access the Google web page and install the icon app on their phones’ home screen.

That’s why the technology possesses several SEO benefits, including website loading speed improvement.

Besides, progressive apps are a great digital marketing tool. In this regard, the platform possesses several visibility opportunities. Because of that, progressive web app development includes access to smartphone features to improve the user experience.

For example, your eCommerce marketing can benefit from the technology by sending push-notifications and providing offline support to your clients.

Why Does your eCommerce Business Need Progressive Web App Development?

The greatest benefit that progressive web apps bring to eCommerce is the ability to have an app without heavy investment in native mobile app development.

You won’t need to adjust your app to fit different requirements and receive app store approvals, a must-have stage for publishing Android, iOS, and Windows apps. Moreover, you won’t need to invest in app store optimization (ASO). Progressive web apps are SEO-friendly, and your clients will use them without entering app stores.

Your PWA will look like a mobile version of your website, but the cloud-based technology behind it will create a native-like experience for users. This is the shortest way to achieve the needed extent of digital acceleration by maintaining high safety standards and meeting your customers in their smartphones.

Even if your business already has a native app (or any other eCommerce web application), going for a progressive web app will improve the key engagement metrics.

As for the main indicators, businesses investing in the technology get the best results in terms of app size, loading speed, conversion rate, bounce rate, and reaching areas with poor Internet connectivity.

For instance, Twitter decreased its app size by 97%, which resulted in a 20% reduction in bounce rate. In their turn, Starbucks has doubled its number of daily active users with an app that became 99.84% smaller than its already existing mobile iOS app.

5 Key Benefits of Progressive Web App to eCommerce

1. Safety and efficiency. Progressive web apps rely on HTTPS communication protocol, which lets your customers process their payments without the need to switch between a mobile app and a desktop. Skipping this obstacle will have a positive effect on the key elements of your sales funnel, including retention rate, conversion rate, and the number of returning visitors. What’s more, it addresses the current concerns of retail customers.
2. Lightweight. Progressive web apps are lighter than native apps, which results in faster loading speed, automatic refreshments, and a greater user experience. It’s easy to find and quick to download, free of lagging, and can work offline. Most businesses using this technology have reduced their app size by 80-99% of the initial mobile app size.
3. Cost-effective cross-device nature. A progressive web app is compatible with various operating systems and fits the screen size of different devices. This feature is useful for developing an omnichannel business strategy. Given the need to invest in native app development for each separate platform and device, eCommerce using progressive web apps makes the decision with true value-for-money.
4. Attracts web traffic. Progressive web apps have their own URLs, are available in search engine results, and let your SEO specialists work with their performance. Thanks to this, it’s an effective solution for eCommerce web development. Also, it cuts the app maintenance cost, eliminating the need for creating a separate budget for ASO activities.
5. Browser-based fully functional app. A progressive web app looks like a native app but is easy to reach as if it’s a mobile web page. At the same time, this feature doesn’t need technical complexity to deliver a satisfactory user experience. Progressive apps don’t use much data and can work even in areas with poor Internet connectivity.

4 Main Attributes of a PWA for eCommerce

Even though progressive web apps look like mobile web pages, they should possess extra native-like functionality to guarantee the required quality level for user experience.

For example, push notifications and app installation are must-have features, while GEO fencing is an optional one. In this section, we’ve collected the key attributes of these apps for guidance if you decide to invest in eCommerce web application development of this type.

Low Development Cost

With a progressive web app, eCommerce should significantly save on app development. At least, because this tool doesn’t need separate creation, maintenance, and promotion for various app stores and platforms. Your web app can use your website as a basis.

Nevertheless, the cost-effective solution should link your website and mobile experience in an elegant manner. The new platform shouldn’t look like a poor-quality version of your mobile website.

The aim of PWA development is to provide a unified platform for several channels a sole team can work with. This means uniting key native app features in a single platform that works smoothly on any device and operating system and is in compliance with your current SEO.

And, of course, the platform should be safe to enter and process mobile payments like a great retail app.

What’s more, your clients should enjoy the user experience they appreciate the most. At least, this low-cost solution should still look nice to you and to them.

This way, you’ll get a cheaper solution for the same quality of service your competitors normally invest thousands of dollars.

Main Screen Installation

Your users should have an option to install the app on their phones. Otherwise, there’s no need to invest in eCommerce web application development.

Generally, people don’t like to download apps from app stores. Especially if they don’t see the true value right away. That’s why progressive web apps should possess all the needed attributes to actually make an installation happen.

The needed button should be easy to find and work smoothly. The aim is to provide your clients with an opportunity to window shop your eCommerce store in their browser as they like and then download your app to proceed with purchase smoothly and conveniently.

Ability to Send Push Notifications

The best thing your eCommerce business can benefit from native app-like traits of web apps is push notifications. You can use this tool for sending discounts, special offers, and promotions.

Even better, you can customize the messages to address the need for eCommerce personalization, the crucial tool for your company to stay competitive, increase revenue, and enhance the services.

For example, you can generate product offers, content, and specific suggestions based on a user’s browsing experience — and notify them in a push notification via an app installed on their home screens.

With push notifications, you can reach users who browse your web anonymously and without leaving any contact details. Web apps don’t require any other actions but to install them on a home screen in a couple of clicks.

Fast Loading Speed for SEO Optimization

You should guarantee your users an exceptionally fast experience. With an appropriate eCommerce web development approach, you can create an app that can load with a second only.

This is possible when you combine the speed advantages of websites and enable caching from their side, making a mobile web page look like a native app.

Another trick behind speed acceleration is the lightweight of a progressive app. By occupying less disk space, it needs less data to load and fills less storage space. Compared to native iOS and Android apps, it’s dozens of times smaller.

Web basis of progressive apps enables their discoverability in search engines. And their great speed characteristics.

Contact Intellectsoft for eCommerce Web Development Services

Our team stays tuned for more news in the retail industry, and we’ll be glad to create a web app for your business with the highest standards in secure payment gateway integration.

From our extended list of retail applications and software services, you can get:

• Marketing automation. Update your app on the fly with geolocation and navigation, gamification, content management, push notifications, and social networking.
• Mobile users engagement. Let your customers shop online and enjoy an offline-like experience with augmented reality, geofenced messaging, in-store navigation, recipe shopping, and other custom features.
• Turning data into revenue. Get a comprehensive software solution that includes POS, smart design, IoT, Big Data analytics, and training.

Interested in getting the details? Contact the Intellectsoft team! Let’s choose and build together the software solution that perfectly fits your exact eCommerce business needs.

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