A Comprehensive Manual on Patient Management Software Development

Modern healthcare software is progressing at a breakneck speed. We can hardly imagine a contemporary clinic without digitalized electronic health records (EHR), a robust hospital management system, telehealth solutions, various IoT-hinged patient tracking software, you name it. 

Whatever the narrow purposes of digital health tools, their overarching goal is to ensure positive treatment outcomes and provide best-in-class patient care. It is impossible without harnessing a high-end patient management system that will act as a high-tech glue holding multiple elements of the healthcare process together.

This article contains an exhaustive manual on patient management software development. It explains this platform’s essence and necessity for medical organizations, healthcare professionals, and patients, its benefits, and basic features. It also gives an understanding of SDLC steps and challenges and the budget you should allocate for this kind of health tech development. 

What is a Patient Management Software?

In the B.C. age (that is, before computers), managing patient-related records was a challenging task for healthcare providers, who eventually got snowed under the multitude of data about their customers. The ruthless onslaught of the global pandemic has underscored the vital importance of immediate access to a patient’s critical health information, which is literally a life-and-death issue. 

Luckily, the across-the-board advent of Industry 4.0 has ushered in efficient patient management solutions that allow clinics to handle patient information and administrative tasks from one dashboard. As an integral element of centralized medical practice software platforms, patient management systems (PMS) assist providers in clinical workflow automation concerning appointment scheduling, billing, diagnosis tracking, and other shop floor activities. At the same time, medical service consumers enjoy a streamlined and facilitated procedure of obtaining the full cycle of primary care, from setting up a meeting with a physician to paying for the rendered services. 

“This is a medical record system, right?” some may ask. Not exactly. EMR and EHR systems have features that focus on health data management and are leveraged primarily by clinicians. Like, for example, a medical data management platform we’ve built that facilitates patient information acquisition and improves request processing speed, saving hundreds of hours of doctors’ time. By contrast, a PMS is honed for storing and managing administrative information regarding billing, scheduling, insurance claims, etc., and is mostly utilized by managerial personnel. 

How necessary are such solutions for healthcare organizations today?

Why Invest in Patient Management Software?

Since the rapid growth of patient numbers and sophistication of medical services have turned shop floor routines in a hospital into a challenging endeavor, healthcare providers have to find a way to tackle the huge amount of data and versatile tasks quickly and efficiently. And patient management systems can live up to all their requirements and expectations because:

• They are a cost-efficient tool for automating the lion’s share of pipeline operations and thus reducing errors caused by the impact of the human factor.
• They guarantee instant access to any internal data concerning patients.
• They can be tailored to suit any kind of healthcare organization, such as general practice hospitals, specialized clinics (dental, ophthalmological, pediatric, orthopedic, urologic, and more), birth centers, mental health and substance abuse rehabs, nursing care facilities, private practitioners, and others.
• They enhance the patient experience.
• They provide regulatory alignment and healthcare compliance.
• Once implemented, they ensure long-term ROI.

Such unquestionable boons appeal to wide user audiences in the healthcare field, which accounts for a spike in the global market for software for patient management. While in 2024, it was worth more than $8 billion, within ten years, it is forecasted to increase more than sevenfold, manifesting a hefty CAGR of almost 20%.

Source

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Well, it does. However, to make the most of custom patient management software development, you should determine what capabilities to include in such clinical software solutions. 

Core Features of Patient Management Software

When you go for custom healthcare software development, you can fill your patient management system with any capabilities that dovetail into your business specifics and requirements. However, some non-negotiable patient management software features should be present in any solution of this kind.

Patient registration and profile management

These features can be independent capabilities or part of a patient portal within the PMS. They allow medical services consumers to enter their personal information (name, age, weight, height, and other physical parameters, insurance ID card, phone number, and address), perform ongoing patient data management by updating information when necessary and uploading documents, and start their user journey across the hospital’s services.

Appointment scheduling

As surveys claim, two-thirds of patients prefer to book an appointment with a specialist online. Appointment scheduling software is honed to meet their expectations, enabling people to arrange a meeting with a doctor at their convenience. The clinic’s staff is on the winning side, too, since this functionality allows them to manage their calendars, plan workload, reduce no-show numbers via automated reminders and confirmations, and optimize resource utilization. 

Electronic Health/Medical Records

EMR integration is essential to a patient management system because it allows doctors and administrative staff to have the client’s medical history at their fingertips. This ability is instrumental in more accurate diagnosis and better treatment and as a source of evidence in case a patient files a complaint. Providers need justification and proof for their recommendations and actions.

Billing and insurance management

Typically, these are two separate functionalities, but they can be joined within a single module to optimize finance- and insurance-related activities. They keep track of all past and current payments, streamline the billing routine, reduce errors, ensure timely financial collections, automatically verify patient eligibility, handle claims data, and even permit the purchase of prescription medicines from partner pharmacies. 

Reporting and analytics

By pooling all relevant data from various sources (EMR, patient portal, IoT devices, third-party systems, and more), the patient management tool provides a 360-degree view of the person’s health, reveals insights, and exposes trends. Such data is the bedrock of different reports on care coordination, population health, treatment outcomes, etc., allowing industry specialists and hospital authorities to elevate medical services to a new level.

Communication tools

Robust chat and telemedicine tools establish efficient interaction channels between medical service providers and consumers. Thanks to them, patients can enjoy all the benefits of remote healthcare, consult a doctor on minor issues, and stay in touch with the medical facility around the clock.

When implemented properly in patient management software development, these features usher in numerous advantages. 

Key Benefits of Patient Management Software

Patient management software is the pivotal element of digital transformation in the healthcare industry. It revolutionizes medical organizations’ workflows by bringing about the following improvements. 

Enhanced operational efficiency

Employing a patient management system enables clinical personnel to facilitate and streamline their shop floor routines, automate multiple pipeline operations, minimize assumptions and guesswork, and improve productivity, thus increasing the overall quality of care they provide.  

Reduced administrative burden

On average, physicians spent 66.5% of their time on direct patient care (23.6% multitasking with use of the electronic health record (EHR) and 42.9% without the EHR), 20.7% on EHR input alone, 7.7% on administrative activities, and 5.0% on other activities (0.6% using the EHR). In total, physicians spent 44.9% of their time on the EHR. The benefits of patient management software allow doctors to drastically reduce such tedious responsibilities and pay more attention to patients than to filling out endless forms and documents. 

Better compliance and security

Healthcare and the financial industry are among the most heavily regulated spheres. As part of HIPAA-compliant software, a PMS ensures adherence to legal standards in the vertical concerning the protection of sensitive information that customers entrust to medical facilities. 

Real-time data access and coordination

By making a patient management system an integral element of their digital infrastructure, all stakeholders in the healthcare sector (patients, doctors, nurses, lab personnel, administrative staff, and others) obtain 24/7 access to relevant information. It speeds up decision-making and facilitates cooperation between different specialists and departments. 

Boosted patient satisfaction

All the above-mentioned improvements translate into a higher quality of services a healthcare provider offers. As a result, treatment outcomes soar, positively influencing patient satisfaction, encouraging them to apply for your assistance next time, and recommending your organization to their family, colleagues, and friends. Thus, an efficiently operating PMS becomes a competitive differentiator for your healthcare business. 

A Step-by-Step Patient Management Software Development Process

Django Stars has accumulated extensive experience in healthcare app development and building custom medical software, which resulted in establishing a six-step algorithm for creating software products.

1. Requirement gathering and discovery

At the outset, we get together with the customer’s representatives and learn about their technical and business requirements and expectations regarding the future patient management system. Then, we outline the functionalities it will contain, determine the programming languages, frameworks, and tools necessary for its implementation, and collect a project team of experts who wield such a tech stack.

2. UI/UX design and prototyping

Knowing all the prerequisites, our UI/UX designers map out user journeys and devise a visual representation of the solution-to-be. They create the prototype as a collection of clickable screens on an interactive UI, manifesting the product’s look and feel. The basic principles they steer by are intuitive navigation, maximum usability, and a minimalistic, uncluttered interface.

3. MVP development 

It is PMS’s first fully functional version with all its core functionalities. We submitted it for trial usage by a pilot audience and meticulously documented their feedback. When we summarize the users’ opinions concerning the MVP’s fortes and—especially—shortcomings, we amend, augment, upgrade, and fine-tune it, turning the minimum viable product into a full-fledged software product.

4. Integration and testing

Patient management solutions never function as standalone products but work as elements of an enterprise-wide ecosystem. To provide seamless interaction with other software products, we integrate the new PMS into the IT infrastructure via a network of APIs. Then, the finished product undergoes a series of compatibility, functional, unit, load, stress, scalability, performance, penetration, and other tests.

5. Deployment

After we find the PMS bug-free and ready for use, we deploy the solution and go live. We configure and tweak the system to ensure smooth operation, making it responsive when performing its functions.

6. Post-launch support

As a reliable vendor, our company stays with the clients as long as they need it or the situation requires it after the PMS is put into operation. Our engineers monitor the performance, introduce updates and patches, fix issues, and consult users on the peculiarities of the solution’s functioning.

No matter how well the development process is planned and implemented, you should always look out for typical roadblocks and bottlenecks along the way.

Challenges in Patient Management Software Development Explored

Having completed numerous projects in the healthcare realm, we are well aware of the pitfalls high-tech specialists face during patient management software development.

Ensuring regulatory compliance

Today, governments and international bodies are concerned with the privacy and safety of personal data entered into software products. To guarantee data protection, they have issued universal and nationwide legal norms (GDPR, CCPA, and others), which are reinforced by industry-specific security standards (HIPAA, PIPEDA, e-Privacy Directive, and more). Their violation incurs hefty fines and severe penalties, even up to medical license revocation. That is why software developers should adopt a security-first approach when building patient management systems, keep track of current norms in this field, and stay tuned for new relevant laws adopted by legislative authorities. 

Data privacy and security

Apart from suffering severe sanctions for data security non-compliance, you may face system penetration attempts and leakage instances undertaken by cybercriminals or occurring through negligence. To counter and minimize them, you should equip the PMS with strong authentication and verification mechanisms, implement effective security protocols, follow a stringent system access policy, and conduct regular security audits.  

Integration with legacy systems

As a rule, healthcare organizations’ digital infrastructure consists of many solutions and platforms built by various vendors at different times. Some are old-school systems that don’t see eye to eye with novel products, especially if they contain disruptive technologies (AI, ML, IoT, etc.). Before integrating the newly crafted patient management software into this intricate and often confusing ecosystem, you should conduct its out-and-out analysis to understand how to marry the products seamlessly and make them play well. 

Interoperability

It is a related issue. Patient management software should not only be compatible with other enterprise products. It should also be able to share data with them, store it, and utilize it coordinatedly. To guarantee free information exchange, you should eliminate barriers to uninterrupted data flow and provide format standardization across the ecosystem.

Managing complex workflows

Some workflows belonging to the healthcare pipeline may appear too challenging to manage within a PMS. Handling them efficiently involves careful workflow mapping, automating repetitive tasks, prioritizing assignments through an established hierarchy, setting up transparent communication channels, continuous monitoring and evaluation, and onboarding a patient-centered approach in all routines.

UI/UX balancing for staff and patients

Hospital personnel and medical services consumers have different needs concerning their PMS. Moreover, they have different technical skills and training in leveraging software products. That is why developers should aim to strike a healthy balance between stakeholders’ varying backgrounds and usage purposes while performing UI/UX design of the patient management system.

Continuous system updates and support

The contemporary IT world never stays put. Novel technological advancements in patient management software development appear almost every month, pushing the envelope in various aspects of software functioning. To ensure a PMS’s adaptability to upcoming challenges, it should be created with an eye to its potential scalability and openness to integrating emerging high-tech tools. Plus, regular software support provides the system’s longevity and maximum uptime.

Budget constraints

As a rule, healthcare institutions aren’t industrial tycoons that can fork out any money on their digitalization initiatives, which are anything but a chump change issue. Realizing this, software vendors should seek cost-efficient ways to create robust PMS solutions to fulfill the expected tasks without making a hole in the customer’s pocket. 

By the way, speaking of money. What budget should a healthcare provider allocate to implement a PMS?

Patient Management Software Development Cost Examined

Every custom patient management system has a unique price tag on it, which is determined by several factors:

• The product complexity (that is, the range of features it contains)
  

• The tech stack needed for implementation (disruptive technologies add to the overall cost considerably)
  

• Necessary integrations (if you go beyond the basic access to EMR, be ready to splurge on each connected system)
  

• Development model (a basic MVP, a mid-tier solution, and full-size enterprise patient management software costs differently)
  

• Regulatory compliance (more advanced compliance capabilities are more expensive to build)
  

• UI/UX design (if you want an exquisite solution with a distinct brand voice, be ready to loosen purse strings)
  

• Project team size (hiring more developers spells greater salary expenditures)
  

• Completion urgency (if the deadline is yesterday, paying for extra working time and additional team members’ efforts is inevitable)
  

• The vendor’s hourly rates (they differ depending on the company’s location)
  

• Hidden costs (maintenance, updates, third-party subscription fees, and support coverage aren’t included directly in patient management software development costs, but they can eventually amount to a sizable sum).
  

Considering all these aspects, a basic PMS will cost between $10,000 and $50,000, whereas an enterprise-level system can cost up to $250,000 and even more.

Cash-strapped startups can’t throw money around and should count every penny they spend on software products. The same applies to big enterprises that can’t splash the cash they have earned so hard. That is why we recommend that both categories of PMS users pay attention to the following budgeting tips. 

• Clearly define the project’s scope.
• Conduct a thorough cost-benefit analysis.
• Prioritize essential features and integrations.
• Utilize pre-built systems, APIs, cloud services, and low-code platforms.
• Regularly track spending and compare actual expenses against the envisioned budget.
• Focus on ROI-generating capabilities.
• Set aside a budget portion for unexpected expenditures.
• Pursue cost-conscious hiring. 

And we have something to say concerning the last advice.

How We Can Help with Patient Management Software Development

For any healthcare provider seeking to implement a bespoke patient management system, the main goal is to find a partner with the best price/quality ratio. Django Stars is just what you are looking for. 

We have been present in the software outsourcing market since 2008. During these years, we have cooperated with various healthcare organizations and accumulated vast theoretical knowledge, hands-on skills, and industry expertise, earning our company superb reviews on rating platforms. We have successfully implemented our best practices of continuous and secure data flow between users, the portal, and your team. This allows us to craft top-notch patient management solutions, providing their full-cycle development, scalability, and regulatory compliance.  

Our qualified and certified mavens leverage the Agile approach during the SDLC. They are ready to meet clients halfway to establish the most convenient communication schedule and collaborate with them regarding various aspects of the future product. As a result, you obtain the best patient management software within time and budget.

Key Takeaways

Unlike electronic medical records, which contain health data most clinicians rely on nowadays, a patient management system (PMS) is honed for use by healthcare organizations’ administrative personnel. A PMS’s features focus on helping managers handle information related to billing, appointment scheduling, insurance claims, and other patient-facing workflows. 

When skillfully crafted and properly operated, such software enhances operational efficiency, minimizes paperwork, automates shop floor processes, ensures real-time data access, and increases patient satisfaction. The best practices of patient management software development include opting for a custom product, following a well-defined roadmap, addressing major SDLC challenges, and hiring a high-profile software vendor to craft a first-rate solution of this kind.