At the same time, as humanity is increasingly immersed in the digital era, the requirements for the quality of healthcare applications are growing. Health care applications allow people to independently control the main indicators of health and make daily choices in the direction of improving their own condition. New diets and training schemes help create a balanced and individual lifestyle that gives you great well-being.
Pharmacists play a key role in successful application integration. Innovative technologies in the mHealth sphere can not only increase patients’ adherence to active treatment of ailments, but also improve the work of pharmacists, making it more automated and efficient in relation to patients.
Pharmaceutical applications
In the modern software market, there is a fairly wide range of applications that somehow allow you to control the daily routine of patients and the scheme for taking medications for acute or chronic forms of diseases.
Finland can be cited as an example – since 2017, clinic patients can only receive prescriptions for medicines in electronic form. Thanks to software, this process has been automated in just a few years. Now, using a smartphone, every finn can get the right medicine with just a few clicks.
This example was the basis for a significant jump in the interest of pharmaceutical companies in digital software. Over the past 5 years, the market share of healthcare applications has almost doubled, providing patients with everything they need. On the Google Play Store or the App Store, you can find thousands of applications of the widest range – from fitness trackers to professional nutrition applications with daily updates.
The most common types of healthcare applications are:
- Access to medication dispensing history. The main feature of these services is the facilitation of feedback from the treating doctors. Thanks to the ease of tracking the history of dispensing certain drugs, the doctor can prescribe drugs exactly in the quantities prescribed to relieve symptoms or completely cure the disease, while saving their number and monitoring the specifics of the course of diseases depending on the effect of the drugs taken;
- Medication reminders. Many senile diseases or diseases of the mental spectrum differ in rather specific requirements for the daily routine of taking medications. If the patient is not able to take medications on his own, appropriate applications will come to his aid, promptly reminding him of the severity of the treatment regimen with sound or other types of signals;
- Online chats with pharmacists. Due to the workload of clinics, the visiting hours of qualified pharmacists are packed to capacity. Pharmaceutical industry-specific applications allow pharmacists to conduct online appointments, significantly saving appointment time and allowing two or three times as many appointments each day;
- Access to medical history. Online file cabinets are gaining more and more popularity – in the developed countries of the world, many private and public clinics have virtual databases with detailed patient histories. Searching for the necessary information takes much less time, and thanks to the ability to find a patient by name using a regular smartphone, every doctor can reduce the time for an effective appointment to a minimum.
Pharmacy applications testing
Healthcare software testing requires an increased focus on platform performance in all environments.
First of all, load testing is required. On some days, several hundred people can be booked into a pharmacist’s appointment – and their simultaneous access to open data, for example, to visiting hours or to the current state of the queue, must be 100% guaranteed.
Among other things, it is required to focus the attention of the test team on testing uptime. An application that people’s lives can depend on must demonstrate full uptime, 24/7.
Also, when testing pharmaceutical applications, attention should be paid to the universality of application integration with different versions of operating systems and different smartphones. Elderly people, most often, do not follow the latest in the consumer gadget industry, and choose cheap smartphone models. An installed operating system 5 years ago is also not uncommon – and even in such conditions, the application should work stably. All errors in functionality, adjusted for old versions of the OS and smartphones, must be taken into account.
Separately, it is worth mentioning scalability testing. The healthcare industry is one of the fastest growing software development target industries, and there is nowhere without scalability testing. If health and fitness app development companies do not know the exact numbers in working with a user audience that can grow on an exponential scale, then the application runs the risk of not coping with the corresponding load and simply drowning among the offers of competitors.
