6 Lessons for Building Great Medical Software - Digitalising the Healthcare Industry and Health Apps

Focus on Healthtech

The unprecedented crisis the whole world is going through right now has got us all thinking about Health - how can we protect it, how can we help staff in the front line fight against COVID-19?
And, most importantly, how can we help build tech products that improve people’s health and even save lives, while making life easier for doctors, clinics, hospitals, and health organizations alike?
A strong focus on health has always been in our company culture, but now it has been on our minds even more than before for obvious reasons.

Sometimes a small mobile or web app can make all the difference in a sector that remains highly un-digitalized! Despite amazing progress in AI that shows that diagnosis capabilities of digital systems are already exceeding doctors’ expectations, the human touch remains essential to the medical act.
There are so many areas where technology can drive breakthroughs and help with automation, organization, communication, connection to medical equipment, diagnosis, intervention, and data analysis to make the lives of both patients and medical professionals easier. 

In our history at Wolfpack Digital, healthtech has always had a special place. This is why we even funded the development of some health-focused projects - see Pamble and Medusa. When it comes to choosing where we put our resources and hearts into, health always comes first. All our donations as of late have gone to the Pneumology Hospital in Cluj to help the medical staff there fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let’s look at a few lessons to keep in mind when building a healthtech product:

6 Lessons for Building Great Medical Apps

1. The health sector has been considered by many experts as the domain with the most room for digitalization in the upcoming years, even from before the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a great time to build healthtech solutions as there is an important need for digitalization in this industry.
    
2. The regulations for healthtech are rapidly changing. For example, Germany has recently published new laws on telemedicine. The regulatory climate is becoming more favorable in many ways.
    
3. Some areas related to healthtech are currently completely non-regulated, while others are limited by outdated laws. This is now changing in the light of the new global situation, which makes telemedicine a priority and thus changing the way governments act. Exploring the opened opportunities can be highly valuable, yet one must always prioritize rigor and safety.
    
4. Most talks at the end of last year were focused on how validation for any kind of digital healthtech tool should respect the rigors applied in pharma when launching a new drug. We attended such a talk at Slush Shanghai, where we exhibited one of our health tech products in September 2019. While regulation is absolutely essential because of the high risks involved, many aspects of the medical act can be safely digitized, especially in these times of need. 
    
5. In order to be successful, you must understand the problem from within. Having experts on this niche in your team is more important than in probably any other field. We wrote about the importance of building tech products for niches and why this is a good idea before.
    
6. When choosing your tech partner to help you build a medical app, make sure you choose a software development company with experience working in this field, as it will help immensely along the way.

Working on Health Apps

In the past 6 years, we’ve had the amazing opportunity to work on several apps focused on digitalizing tools in the pharmacy or health sector, on connecting doctors to patients, or helping with mental health management in difficult times. 
Mental health is just as important as physical health, with the two planes of health being connected: it is, for example, known that immunity is boosted by having a strong mental health state. 

Here are some of the impactful health-centered projects we have contributed to so far:

• Amplicare is a US-based SaaS company allowing comparisons between medicare plans and cost estimations for patients. The mobile tablet application we helped build offers features that help pharmacies increase revenue and improve patient care, such as phone calls automation, identification of new revenue opportunities, display of therapeutic alternatives for patients, etc. 

Here is a testimonial from the CEO of Amplicare, Flaviu Simihaian, about our work together: 

“Working with Wolfpack Digital has been a blast. Gina and her team are very product-oriented and made sure they understood our needs before diving into building the app. This upfront effort paid off by meeting the deadline weeks ahead of schedule.” 

• HealMate is a Romanian startup founded with a commitment to making symptom tracking easier and doctor-patient relationships better, especially remotely, by means of a mobile and web app. We helped design this highly-useful mobile app, and we are currently working on the website dashboard for doctors included in this telemedicine platform, by working directly with the two founders.

• PowerMedic Lasers is a Danish company offering a revolutionary healing hyperlaser. We are grateful to be part of their journey and to help build the IoT mobile app connecting to the healing device. PowerMedic helps patients with their recovery after injury and with boosting fertility.

• Pamble is the first integrated digital treatment for gambling addiction, which is affecting 1-5% of the population in the US, UK, and Canada, and even more during difficult times. By bringing together CBT techniques and other proven techniques used by world-renowned psychotherapy experts, the mobile app is both educational and practical. Pamble won the AlphaHub accelerator competition from 200 teams from 50+ countries in 2019. We have built this app in collaboration with Dr. Viorel Lupu, who is the Head of the Paediatric Psychiatry Clinic in Cluj, which has a special department for addiction treatment and is a Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cluj. 

Here is a review from Robert Smith, Program Director at AlphaHub and Emerging Technology Manager at Flutter, about working with us:

“We were impressed by their understanding of key RG issues and the quality of their concept, Pamble, and we look forward to supporting its evolution. CEO Gina Lupu-Florian showed a passion for the topic and the requisite know-how to make Pamble a success.”

• Medusa is the first meditation app in Romanian, and this is also a fully in-house developed product by Wolfpack Digital Labs. We developed this product to support mental health and wellbeing, as meditation in one’s mother tongue is proven to be more effective in fighting off stress and illness. The Android and iOS apps are structured on multiple topics, such as fighting off depression, boosting self-confidence, calming down before a flight, etc.  

Addiction project. This is one of our top-secret apps we have been working on in the past two years in collaboration with a fellow company from Romania. We cover the web development effort for an app with tens of thousands of users fighting various types of addiction, especially in the US.

Build Your Medical Software with Wolfpack Digital

We have what it takes to build health apps for prevention, diagnosis, intervention, treatment, recovery, and patient management & communication, and we look forward to working on the next meaningful medical software, especially in these times.  

We really know how to work with health professionals! 

Got a health startup, or are you looking to digitalize any health services or any part of the medical act? Get in touch with us and let’s talk!