3 Ways Technology is Changing The Way Healthcare Industry Operates

Did you ever imagine that the IT industry which has brought us productive solutions and innovations would also help us to be more healthy? Believe it or not, technology has come a long way and is tremendously changing the way the healthcare industry functions.

With the sturdy acceptance of smartphones, mobile apps have opened up new avenues for healthcare professionals. From doctors to patients and practitioners, all are using the mobile applications to facilitate easier and quicker healthcare operations and better care for patients. According to Research 2 Guidance, “The market for mHealth (mobile health) app services is expected to reach $26 billion by 2017.”

The top healthcare firms are already exploring the potentialities of application development for mobile to provide remote monitoring and healthcare management services via mobile app. Let us study some of the ways the technology is influencing healthcare industry.

Providing Access To Immediate Care: The days when doctors use to make an in-home visit is now replaced by the digital visit. Whether you want to book an appointment with a doctor, or need a doctor in case of emergency, mobile app like Doctor on Demand can help you find a top doctor and video chat within a matter of seconds. This way you never have to make a potentially dangerous visit to a hospital or keep waiting during emergencies. Another mobile app called, HealthTap allows you to ask general health questions to doctors 24/7. It doesn’t require you to take prior appointments. In addition, this app can be used by the physicians to directly and regularly keep in touch with their patients. This type of virtual interaction is more beneficial for elderly people and children who in most cases are too sick to be shifted to a hospital.

Presenting New Business Models: Using referral pads or making door-to-door visits to foster relationships with patients is now outdated. The RefferalMD mobile app, which is operating in test mode for now, will soon change all the traditional referral methods. This cloud-based application will help doctors to write quick and resourceful referrals. In addition to that, ReferralMD is a great solution to fulfill the massive surge of patient data digitally by allowing medical organizations to market themselves to both new patients and healthcare providers looking for treatment services. As ReferralMD is designed to function with all management practices and software, running medical businesses and keeping patients healthy will become more facile.

Connecting Doctors and Patients Directly: Have you ever been through the struggle of communicating with a doctor in a different language? SAIC has created a mobile app named, Omnifluent Heath where a patient and a doctor speaks into their phone, and the concerns or queries get instantly translated into the language they desire. This huge development is helping doctors all over the world, including in the US, where 47 million residents do not speak English. Now hospitals and healthcare companies can save their cost they spent on translators. PingMD, is yet another medical app, which allows doctors and patients to securely message each other. A doctor can send invite to the patients and share medical details, images, and questions. This app can also be used by doctors internally and they can view the lab results at the same time.

So, it is clear that technology is providing a much-needed update to the healthcare industry. From medical assessment to medical translation, mobile applications are helping patients live a healthy happy life.

Are you using any healthcare mobile app for yourself? Has it helped you improve your health? Share your experiences with us in the comments below.

5 Outstanding Attributes of Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Android Marshmallow is the latest operating system announced by Google in the middle of 2015. Here’s a quick recap of the most important features in the latest release:

1. App Permissions: Google has made it easier for users to refuse or accept permissions to apps when they’re being updated. In addition, they can modify the permissions that they need or accept changes when downloading an app update with new features.
2. Android Pay for mobile payments: Google has revamped its mobile payments capability to rival that of its competitors – Apple Pay and Samsung Pay. Android Marshmallow will ease transactions for its users. All they have to do is tap their phone on a terminal with a NFC-based payment mechanism.
3. Google Now on Tap: This is one of the best Android features and has gained more prominence in Android 6.0. With the help of Google Now, a user can look up contextual information on anything after doing some quick research on any application.
4. Fingerprint Support: Fingerprint technology has become increasingly popular in the last few years. In Android 6.0, Google has added advanced systematized fingerprint support. Smartphones with fingerprint sensors are the latest trend and a must have for enhanced security. They are useful for not only payment authorization through Android Pay, but also add an extra security layer to the device.
5. RAM Management: Apart from the new features discussed above, Android 6.0 comes built-in with an updated RAM manager that is located in the settings menu. Users can check and analyze details like the percentage of RAM being used by apps, for what duration and the free space available.

These are just some of the top features in Android 6.0. Leveraging this popular OS will surely benefit developers and users alike. Are there any other excellent features you have come across?

4 Common App Design Mistakes to Avoid

We live in a Smartphone era, where phones have bigger screens, thinner bodies but are more powerful at the same time. As per a report by Flurry, the number of large screen smartphones in the market has quadrupled over the past few years. This, in turn, has resulted in more screen space for designers.

Mobile is the new frontier for companies around the world where a single application can transform the entire business model.

However, designers sometimes make mistakes. Let’s look at some of the most common design mistakes we see in apps today.

1. Larger Screens Don’t Mean Larger Hands

 
When you develop an app, you need to consider the way a user holds their phone. Steven Hoober says that 80% of the people are more into single-handed use of smartphones.

If you look up thumb zone (a heat map of sorts), it will show you that elements placed beyond the reach of the thumbs are rarely used and often make users stop using apps that rely on those elements. This makes phones less convenient to use with one hand, and hence such apps are unusable on the go. With smartphone screens going upwards of 5-inches, proper element placement is crucial for an app’s success.

2. A Dynamic Drawer Menu

 
Since screens are getting bigger, the top edge of the phone is becoming increasingly hard to get to for most of us with smaller hands and digits. This makes accessing drawer menus harder.

Drawer menus are usually placed on the top left corner of the screen. However, with larger phones, getting to the menu icon is a lot harder. Therefore, designers should create a more dynamic drawer menu that moves around in landscape and portrait views so that users can access it easily.

3. Forms & User Inputs

 
Even though smartphone users have access to full QWERTY keypads, that doesn’t mean they like typing. Contact and feedback forms should be simplified and optimized so that users don’t have to type a lot. Another thing you can do is use cookies and store user cache data. That would make it easier for users to retrieve form data from previous sessions.

4. Gestures & Floating Navigation

 
Most developers forget that smartphones nowadays can use swipes and other such gestures, because it simplifies the use of your application significantly and makes it more intuitive.

You can also make the menu icon float around the screen, so the user can move it to whatever position suits them best. However, don’t forget that users can’t ‘hover’ over items to access submenus, so design accordingly.

A simple gesture can simplify complex tasks that might take ages with traditional navigation. For example, in an iPhone, users can swipe a message to access the delete button in their inbox. You can employ such gestures throughout your application that utilize various sensors and native gestures that phones come with nowadays.

Can you think of any other design mistakes that app designers tend to make? In your opinion, what’s the worst mistake a designer could make? Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!