Dr Jonathan Cheng, Associate Consultant, Department of Surgical Intensive Care, SGH shares with us his thoughts on how a no-code platform can help develop mobile app that supports clinical work
Healthcare providers in acute care settings and operating theatres have to keep up with medical knowledge, the latest literature and a multitude of protocols daily. The use of mobile applications to deal with this has become increasingly common, but developing a solution that is personalized for individuals and departments can be daunting due to perceived high barriers to entry. We share the experience of rapidly developing a personalized in-house web-app with a small team of clinicians and no initial funding. No-code platforms have matured and lowered the barriers to entry for app development greatly. Developing a personalized app is now a very viable option for clinicians looking to solve specific problems.
Not long ago, only a very small group of software engineers built things on the internet. These often ambitious people spent months learning to code before publishing even the most basic websites. Soon, with the development of web-based and mobile applications, vendors started to provide services to develop applications for clinicians. However, more often than not, these are often costly, complicated and do not fully fulfill the requirements of the clinician.
With the ever-evolving requirements in clinical medicine, traditional programming means are being considered as time-consuming and expensive. In prior years there have been reports of clinicians developing their own apps, notably to support clinical education. These have been limited by certain features of the platforms, in addition to cost of distribution.
Most recently, no-code and low code solutions are increasingly considered as a viable suite of solutions particularly for its ability to create applications without using a programming language. The barriers to entry are so low that it is worth the clinician’s time to explore these platforms as an avenue to develop applications for use as a long-term solution or on an ad-hoc basis to respond to particular challenges and tasks.
The platform of no-code is equipped with everything a user requires to create an application. Utilizing no-code platforms, healthcare professionals can move fast with less costs with rapid developmental cycles. It is an easy route for clinician developers who look for solution designs without all the technical skills required for them. With no-code, the technical aspects of application development are replaced with a more accessible route, which further reduces the barriers for entry in digitalization.
Organizations can work well without mobilizing internal IT capabilities which might require approval and budgetary restrictions. When utilizing a no-code platform, any developer with basic skills can develop applications according to their solution requirements with little vested enterprise resources.
Developers will also be able to create applications quickly as compared to conventional coding methods. Developers are able to reduce the development time and rapidly deploy and develop features that are well received while trimming features that a poorly utilized. This allows organic growth of the application and fulfills a smaller and more rapid developmental cycle.
With the changing demands of healthcare, developers may need to change the application design midway during the developmental process. This traditionally costs both time and money, requiring compilation of code and integration with external application programming interfaces. With no-code, developers are able to integrate changes with ease and enhance functionalities in the applications whenever required. With this, streamlining of the development process occurs and it significantly reduces the time-to-market and hence provides better experiences for their end-users.
The no-code platform is a very resource efficient substitute for traditional application development that both integrates current digital demands and reduces the efforts of an organization. Healthcare organizations can best optimize and automate their business processes by developing applications at the enterprise level.
Here, we briefly describe the common workflow for the development and implementation of an anaesthesia and intensive care application that aims to improve the access of information for healthcare professionals. The initial ideation took place after interaction with junior staff who express difficulty in accessing just-in-time information in the course of their care provision.
Prior to the implementation of this web-application, the department relied on the hospital intranet as a central repository of documents. Some clinicians would store documents on their mobile devices for easy reference. Computer terminals in the department also often had documents downloaded by users on their desktops for easy reference, with the updating of the documents done ad-hoc by clinicians using the terminals.
Design thinking was used to decide on the key requirements and critical considerations to guide development of the mobile application. The app framework was rapidly developed within a day. Information was curated and relevant content was uploaded to the encrypted servers. This took the app from development to trial phase in about 8 man-hours of work.
Critical to every hospital technology is security and privacy. In line with hospital regulations, this web- app would not contain any patient information, any sensitive or restricted information, or even any personal contact numbers. Distribution of the mobile application is restricted to a whitelist and does not appear on any search engines or app stores. This allows the application to be only available to users with whom the app is shared intentionally.
Continual upkeep of information is often challenging for application developers. By providing a validated and curated information source, end-users are able to have confidence in the content. Close coordination with all stakeholders in the department was key to ensuring this, with the appointment of content editors and subject matter experts reviewing the material. The ability to do this was also supported by the choice of platform, which allowed for multiple team members to do updates in a very simple fashion. The choice of web-app as opposed to a traditional downloaded app also ensured that no app updates were dependent on end-user’s actions. Non-code applications allows for new changes to be pushed and can be immediately reflected when they next accessed the application.
No-code platforms have lowered the barriers of entry for app development, empowering clinicians who can now create their own customized apps to enhance their clinical work. For clinicians who aim to create a department level app, we share our experiences and lessons learnt from such an implementation.
