Cloud News

Vendor Partnership Simplifies Digital Health App Building

CloudMine, Medical Web Experts collaborate to provide organizations with secure and fast digital health app building tools.

Digital health app building needs simplified tools.

Source: Thinkstock

By Elizabeth O'Dowd

- Medical Web Experts recently announced a partnership with CloudMine to assist healthcare organizations in building connected digital health apps.

Medical Web Experts provides organizations with HIPAA-compliant mHealth and web development services. The company serves medical practices, hospitals, health systems, integrated delivery networks, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers, labs, and health IT vendors.

CloudMine offers various developer tools such as HIPAA-compliant data storage, a logic engine to deploy backend code, and support for Apple's ResearchKit.

Medical Web Experts now offers its clients CloudMine tools to simplify the development process and shorten app build times. CloudMine tools provide Medical Web Expert’s clients with compliance assistance and common functionality support.

The companies decided to collaborate due to the needs of a mutual client, Sway Health, which used CloudMine as a HIPAA-compliant databasing solution for its digital health application. Sway Health had also contracted Medical Web Experts to build its platform.

"As a digital health founder, I'm constantly asked by clients whether the information we collect and store in our application is secure and compliant," Sway Health CEO Kevin DePopas said in a statement. "By working with CloudMine and MWE, I can rest assured healthcare security experts are taking care of both data storage and development."

Using CloudMine’s tools and Medical Web Expert’s platform, Sway was able to speed up the development process, improve provider engagement, and increase security. The companies saw how their solutions worked together allowing Sway to cost-effectively improve the digital healthcare of its clients.

CloudMine and Medical Web Experts believe that mHealth is growing so rapidly, but certain regulations put the healthcare sector years behind other industries technologically. Healthcare organizations are hindered by budget, staff, and compliance restraints that make it more difficult for them to deploy their mobile strategies.

The companies also point to the importance of user experience to digital health success. The quicker organizations are able to build well-constructed, user friendly applications, the better patient and clinician interactions will be.

Patient and clinician facing apps are becoming more popular in healthcare settings, prompting organizations to invest in technology that allows them to securely and quickly build the apps required to support digital health.

The demand for apps assisting clinicians in retrieving PHI and improving general workflow puts a strain on IT budgets. Budget restrictions cause organizations to examine their development process more quickly and invest in technology that will eventually give them a positive ROI.

Organizations are struggling to build, deploy, and manage costly apps. Furthermore, they often also lack on-site developers that can build a custom app from the ground up.

Low-code application development platforms are one of the options steadily gaining traction in the healthcare industry.

Many organizations are using low-code platforms or rapid mobile app development (RMAD) platforms to build apps quickly with less oversight from developers. Low-code platforms and RMAD tools allow other IT staff or app users to develop parts of the app.

Low-code platforms assist healthcare organizations in developing apps that clinicians want to use, and also allow organizations to produce multiple apps quickly because they do not need to be built from scratch.

The demand for more health IT apps is growing rapidly and organizations are looking to deploy multiple custom apps based on user needs. Low-code development platforms and RMADs are key tools in allowing organizations to build highly secure and functioning apps. 

Healthcare organizations anticipating an increase in the number of apps included in their health IT infrastructure need to examine tools to ensure they are cost effective, secure, and can produce apps quickly.