21 January 2021

How to Build a Custom Health Monitoring System for Hospitals?

The year 2020 was full of challenges and the greatest of them were in the sphere of healthcare. COVID-19 revealed the major pain points of the system. Even before the pandemic, there was a challenge of the population growing older. In our everyday life the independence of elderly people already comes with high risks, however, this particular category fell under special risk in 2020.

It put forward the necessity to improve the technologies of tracking and monitoring activities and health conditions of elderly and infected people. Today human behavior analytics and activity recognition are integral parts of the healthcare system. No surprise that hospital health monitoring software development becomes the top priority in the healthcare of contemporaneity.

MarketsandMarkets predicts that the health monitoring market will grow almost twice by 2025 from $1,5 to $2.9 billion.

The catastrophic failure of medical infrastructure witnessed in recent years requires huge capital investments in health monitoring across various countries of the world. So, health monitoring system development is not only vital but also a profitable sphere to enter today.

What is a Health Monitoring System

A Health Monitoring System for hospitals is a mighty solution that helps save lives. As it’s clear from its name such a system can monitor people’ s health round the clock, track vitals (such as temperature, respiration rate, heart rate, blood pressure, level of glucose, blood oxygen saturation, skin perspiration, and more) gather statistics and transmit data using multifaceted technologies.

For any medical center or hospital with many patients, HMS is an incredible means that allows providing quick and timely medical aid in an emergency. Besides, it can serve as an early warning system detecting anomalies or illnesses at the earliest stage and prevent further serious problems with health.

Today we’ll try to give you a profound understanding of an HMS and its development.

The Key Arguments to Create a Healthcare Monitoring System Today

It’s no brainer that a smart patients monitoring system can be scripted to offer informed and prompt diagnosing, allowing to continuously monitor the care receiver. With such a system, a person always knows which actions he should take in specific conditions, thus the system reduces the necessity of hospitalization. A patient can recover at home, yet under remote surveillance and in constant contact for medical advice with the specialist.

For the medics working with lots of patients in the hospitals, it’s convenient to have all data on one screen to balance out their workload and medical resources better. On the one hand, they are relieved of the necessity to manually process a large amount of data, on the other hand, alarmed by the AI-powered system in time, they can focus on patients in danger and organize time and activities with more efficiency.

For medical centers and hospitals, HMSs integration results in better patients, resource and staff management, cost-efficiency, and optimized operation, which inevitably leads to better service and patients’ treatment.

Let’s look into the advantages of a Healthcare Monitoring System as a tool in more detail.

The key benefits of HMS to mention here are:

1. Portability

Wireless wearables serving as sensors are nowadays small, portable and easy to use. So, a patient can wear the device anywhere with no limits to his or her daily activities and the data is transmitted using wireless sensor networks. Due to the timely alarms, dangerous states, like heart attacks, for instance, can be prevented before the complications set in.

2. Health surveillance 24/7

Wearable sensors increase patients’ mobility, allowing to control their health remotely and even at home. A device is stuck to the body and it transmits the gathered data in real time to the hospital monitoring software. It helps to focus on urgent patients. What is more, the tool can be remotely connected to a respirator, EMG or EDA sensors. All the vital info is tracked and stored in a database. It’s useful for checking the illness history as well as for nursing patients with memory failures.

3. Alert function

When a patient requires regular checking a smart Health Monitoring System can be preset to analyze his or her condition, recognize critical states, and send warnings directly to the doctor’s emergency pager or smartphone right away.

4. Multi functionality

Health monitoring systems are as a rule multifunctional, they can not only monitor the health condition of an individual and provide timely details to doctors, but also offer parental monitoring services, emergency alarms, instantaneous suggestions, cloud storage facility, and more.

Health Monitoring System Development: Layers, Architecture, Functions

Today technology supports medical staff and lighten their burden to a great extent. However, to make a healthcare monitoring system it’s essential to understand how it operates.

Comprehension of the HMS working principles and the way its layers interact will help you create a solution that operates like a clock. However, when you build a healthcare monitoring system bear in mind that any system requires onboarding for both medics and patients, that’s why it’s vital to make the interface intuitive and simple to use by non-technical people.

Further on we deal with HMS Architecture in more detail.

Architecture

The hospitals’ systems of monitoring naturally comprise hardware and software components, programming interfaces, data analysis algorithms and custom features.

Variable microprocessors, low-power amplifiers, ADC converters, LCDs, and sensors belong to the hardware part, while the software is applied for information collection, storage in the cloud databases, processing and displaying in real-time or notifying a medic or a family member in case of emergency.

The functionality of an HMS is distributed between its layers: perception, API, E-health app, or service.

So technically the 4 layers of the system are:

Sensitive Layer

This is the initial level that contains multifaceted sensors where the patient’s data is gathered and sent to a processing equipment. You can program your tool, so that a medic can track sugar level, blood pressure, or heartbeat of the patient. Besides the person’s location can also be set to track (a useful feature for the patients with memory disorders supervision).

API layer

Various APIs are used at this layer to store the information about the new patient’s and to display data of those registered in the system. This layer, being the central part of any HMS, is enabled when the info collected from the patient should be fast forwarded to the doctor.

Data processing

Information analysis that takes place at this stage driven by AI allows the system to identify the condition of an ill person and notify the doctor if there is emergency. What is more, AI can detect a threat, even when everything looks normal at first glance to both doctor and care recipient.

Application

As soon as the information processed the doctor gets a notification into the app installed on a mobile device or PC. Having checked all the details a medic can make a well-weight decision as to the immediate measures or further treatment. More than that, a good HMS can analyze the information received from wearables and make AI-based suggestions as to the potential diagnosis and course of actions to stabilize the patient’s condition. A pre-built AI algorithm analyzes data, can even compare it with the data of other patients, and generate a prescription or possible solution.

How to Build a Health Monitoring System for a Hospital

As soon as you’ve decided to develop software for patient health monitoring, you should consider the following aspects:

• how patient data will be collected,
• how the information should be presented to doctors and care receivers,
• in what way a doctor-patient interaction will be realized,
• how a software solution will interface with the patients.

Patients’ health data sources

Health monitoring can be realized with the help of wearables, accessories, smart sensors, and medical devices through the apps like HealthKit, Google Fit, or similar custom applications. Heart rate, activity level, body temperature monitoring can be realized in such a way and tracked along with clinical records.

The patients’ data can be shared via specific secure APIs or alternatively via a Bluetooth or direct Wi-Fi connection.

The way of integration with hospitals

It’s the next common-sense step to consider since doctors should get the real-moment patients’ data and hassle-free access to it to provide prompt advice, guidance, or help.

Thus, a remote tracking solution should be connected to the hospital’s EHR/EMR system through a secure API. Mind please that it should adhere to the due healthcare standards adopted in the country the HMS operates in.

The way to provide information to patients

The key function of a monitoring system is to serve the health data to the medical center, however, it’s no less important to motivate patients to use the solution. We can achieve it through proper data visualization, so that a person could check his health parameters and symptoms’ intensity, for instance.

Interaction between a doctor and a patient

Nowadays video conferencing feature is a highly welcome feature for such software solutions since you can not only communicate but also examine the patient to some extent. Though for the systems developed from scratch, it may seem a costly feature, it’s better not to save on it.

There are reliable video conferencing SDKs that can operate cross-platform and support end-to-end encryption security to choose from. Besides, these tools support real-time chats, which is also vital for effective treatment and care.

Preventive care

Technologies can nowadays make treatment and care more efficient, machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms can be programmed to predict illness deterioration since the solution monitors a patient’s health condition round the clock.

Notifications

A timely alarm can save a life! So, the notifications about the patient’s critical state or symptom are a vital feature to implement in a health monitoring system. They can be realized in the form of push-notifications, SMSs, or alarm messages, but they should go in synchronization for both parties (doctors and care receivers) on the corresponding platforms. For patients, the feature can be integrated into a mobile application they use for the purpose, while doctors may be notified in their alarm pagers, mobile devices, cloud apps, or in the email.

It’s essential to take into consideration the requirements of HIPAA and not include the patients’ data into notifications.

What is the Cost of Health Monitoring System Development

The standard answer to this question is «It depends»...

The cost of development of any software product is determined by the project scale, complexity, and technologies used. To make a hospital healthcare monitoring system is a challenging task since it is a sensitive area that requires taking lots of aspects into consideration, maintaining accuracy, and adhering to the healthcare regulations all at the same time.

At Stfalcon the price for an HMS development will start from $150 000. We carry out a discovery as the initial stage of every project, offer design solutions to our clients, realize back and front-end development, and always test the software we deliver. It allows us to make sure our software solution operates in a proper way, according to all the client’s guidelines and requirements, being at the same time convenient and intuitive for target users. Such an approach allows us to deliver quality to our customers.

Stfalcon Experience

Though the Stfalcon team has not yet developed a Health Monitoring System as it is, we have dealt with healthcare app development.

The users can choose their insurance type in the app, select a doctor they need, according to his specialization and location, choose the suitable free time slot in his schedule for an appointment and confirm it. As a result, the doctor is notified about the booked appointment.

The key benefits of such a mobile system are:

• Improved service through the decreased waiting time for the patients,
• Reduced risks for the patients due to the fast reaction to emergencies,
• Automation of the documentation and improved interaction of the medical staff along with its better management and control,
• Simple and intuitive UI convenient and clear for any user.

Conclusion

Health Monitoring System development is a vital innovation that does not come cheap, however, health is important enough to invest in it. Stfalcon team always looks for the best and most cost-efficient ways to implement the functionality that is wanted by the client.

As we have already some healthcare software development expertise, we’ll gladly take up the development of a healthcare monitoring system. In case you have ideas on how to start, let’s your project discuss together.