Building SaaS for Healthcare Platforms: Cloud & Data Migration Strategy

Key Takeaways

• SaaS medical software is a cloud-based application that can be accessed over the Internet without the need for on-site installation or infrastructure management.
• It provides healthcare organizations with accessible, scalable, cost-efficient, secure, integrated, and regularly updated solutions.
• Healthcare SaaS offers features like electronic health records (EHR), practice management, patient scheduling, billing, telemedicine, and patient engagement tools.

Healthcare companies want technology to assist their medical personnel and improve the quality of patient care. However, outdated software often complicates their workflow. In this case, we recommend developing a healthcare SaaS software that will be tailored to your needs.

In this article, we will explain why SaaS is expected to be the most popular cloud model in this market. We’ll also tell you how building a SaaS platform benefits healthcare providers, how to move your old infrastructure to the cloud, and what features will enhance your facility. Make sure to read until the end to learn about technical and legal difficulties you may face during SaaS healthcare software development.

SAAS Healthcare Market Size

According to The Business Research Company’s Healthcare Software as a Service Global Market Report 2024, the healthcare SaaS market was experiencing significant growth, driven by the increasing adoption of cloud-based healthcare applications. The report examines market developments through 2023 and provides forecasts through 2028, highlighting the expanding role of SaaS solutions in healthcare delivery and administration.

The healthcare SaaS market is developing rapidly due to tech advancements and cloud adoption. For example, leading companies are integrating next-gen SaaS technologies like AI, Vertical SaaS, Pay-Per-Use Models, IoT, and system integration. Cloud computing also drives market growth by enhancing data security, scalability, flexibility, and cost savings.

What Is a SAAS Healthcare Software

Software as a service (SaaS) is a cloud-based delivery model that allows hosting and deploying applications on third-party infrastructures. For example, your healthcare software applications are hosted on the cloud and delivered online.

This allows healthcare organizations to access and use software applications via web browsers rather than installing and maintaining them on local servers or computers. At the same time, they pay for the service through a subscription model.

SaaS in healthcare centralizes patient records and clinical data, providing a platform for efficient collection, storage, and retrieval. It supports telemedicine by enabling remote consultations, video conferencing, and virtual health visits. SaaS also manages Electronic Health Records (EHR), offering real-time access to patient data and treatment histories.

Advantages of Building a Healthcare SaaS for Hospitals

Healthcare facilities are quickly moving toward cloud-based solutions due to:

• Cost efficiency
• Scalability
• Accessibility
• Compliance and security
• Resource-effective management

Let’s discuss them in more detail.

Cost Efficiency

Building a healthcare SaaS solution cuts app development costs by replacing upfront investments with a pay-as-you-go model. Subscriptions cover usage, not hardware or software licenses, easing budget management. Additionally, SaaS providers handle maintenance, updates, and security, reducing hospitals’ operational expenses and IT burdens.

Scalability

Healthcare SaaS platforms scale seamlessly with hospital needs, adapting to patient volume and service expansions. This flexibility supports day-to-day operations and accommodates surges in demand, like during health crises, without requiring extra hardware or extensive reconfiguration. That means hospitals can grow their services and facilities without IT system constraints.

Accessibility

Healthcare professionals securely access software from any device with the internet, whether on-site, remote, or in telemedicine consultations, where doctors can consult with patients online. Enhanced accessibility improves collaboration among healthcare teams and speeds up decision-making processes, leading to better patient outcomes.

Compliance and Security

Healthcare SaaS providers may offer security features such as encryption, regular updates, audit logging, and role-based access controls. However, compliance with regulations such as HIPAA requires appropriate technical safeguards, organizational policies, contractual arrangements, and ongoing risk assessments. Healthcare organizations should verify that their SaaS vendors can support the applicable security and privacy requirements.

Resource-Effective Management

Healthcare SaaS solutions streamline hospital resource management by automating administrative and clinical workflows. They enable efficient staff scheduling, allocation of hospital beds, and medical equipment coordination. Data analytics offer insights into resource utilization, while predictive analytics forecast patient admissions.

Features of Custom Medical SaaS Platforms

The features below will turn your SaaS platform into a valuable solution for patients and medical personnel.

Document Management

Healthcare facilities should implement a module for managing medical records and other important files, allowing for:

• Uploading multiple files in batches
• Automatic text filling
• Natural language processing (text and voice recognition for prescription processing and - health data entry)
• Ability to upload documents for patients
• Clinical document templates
• Support for multiple file sizes and formats, including image and video files
• Automatic image and video format conversion

EHR Integration

Integrating your EHR with a SaaS platform enables swift access, sharing, and management of patient health information, facilitating the exchange of videos and images to enhance diagnostic accuracy.

At the same time, health information exchange (HIE) streamlines medical data transfer among clinics and organizations. A clinical decision support system (CDSS) analyzes EHR and EMR data to offer diagnosis and treatment suggestions.

Telehealth

Telemedicine (video-conferencing) is one of the fastest-growing healthcare technology trends. Studies indicate that the pandemic made 75% of Americans more willing to try virtual care. Nearly half (45%) of adults surveyed have used telehealth services at least once, with a significantly higher usage rate (61%) among adults aged 18 to 34.

A video conferencing module in your SaaS can help doctors:

• Examine symptoms, wounds, respiratory efforts, and other signs remotely
• Make diagnoses and prescribe medication
• Follow the treatment progress and check the results

Scheduling and Notifications

Scheduling tools will allow your doctors and patients to book and move appointments inside the app. Reports suggest that 48% of adults have used online/mobile self-scheduling to book medical appointments in the last year, indicating widespread adoption. At the same time, 11% of healthcare consumers surveyed noted their provider lacks online scheduling options.

If you want to ensure that visitors don’t forget about their visits, consider email, text, and push notification reminders. Also, integrate your platform with calendar apps and hospital management software.

Administrative Tools

An administrative module for your healthcare platform will help run your facilities and keep an eye on business performance with tools for:

• Medical staff performance monitoring
• Finance and accounting
• Inventory and pharmacy information control
• License and subscription management
• Patient information monitoring (lifetime value, churn, acquisition cost, recurring revenue)
• Targeted marketing (email campaigns, product offerings, discounts)

Digital Payments and Billing

A billing module is critical for a SaaS solution if you want your staff to spend less time on redundant tasks. Be sure to include:

• Automated invoicing and tax management
• Billing management features
• Metrics for expenses and revenue (for individual clients, client groups, and hospitals)
• Payment failure and refund handling
• Multi-currency support and multiple payment methods
• Special offers and discount management
• Checking for insurance coverage and reimbursement for healthcare services

Data Analytics and Reporting

You need a software module to analyze the activity and performance of your SaaS product:

• Used memory and storage (per facility, user group, and individual)
• Devices used to access the platform
• Bandwidth costs (per facility, user group, and individual)
• Periods of increased and reduced activity
• System uptime

Patient Support Portal

Self-service portals can help patients complete routine tasks without contacting administrative staff. Features such as appointment scheduling, bill payments, document uploads, and access to medical records can improve convenience while reducing repetitive administrative work.

Compliance Management

A compliance management module can help ensure that your software and activities align with data security laws and practices. The model usually includes:

• Audit management for investigating law compliance issues (HIPAA, GDPR, UK-GDPR, PCI DSS) and security standards (ISO 27001 and 27002)
• Scheduled reports on performance indicators for sensitive business processes
• Fraudulent activity detection for payments and financial statements
• Compliance and security training for medical staff and IT departments

How to Move Your Healthcare Product to the SaaS Model

You need to consider a plethora of factors when shifting your workflows to the SaaS model. The process involves multiple stages, starting from an in-depth audit of your current platform.

1. Analyze Your IT Infrastructure

Your main points of attention during the analysis should include:

• Goals of SaaS medical software development for key stakeholders
• Primary patient categories (demographics, age, medical conditions)
• Local government regulations and certification procedures
• Current usage of storage and compute resources (CPU and RAM)
• Interoperability capabilities of your electronic health record (EHR) and management systems
• Business and operational support services to integrate into the SaaS platform
• Software modules to add to your healthcare software
• Workflows to discard (productivity bottlenecks)
• Personal health information (PHI) you collect, store, and share
• Data management and backup policies and procedures
• Security and privacy protection mechanisms

By the end of the assessment, you should define the project’s overall scope, budget, and timeframes. The web development team has to document all technical requirements and collect stakeholders’ approval.

2. Choose the Optimal SaaS Architecture

After learning modern architecture best practices and gathering technical specifications, you need to select a cloud microservices architecture based on the required resources and data isolation. Your options include single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS:

• Single-tenant SaaS architecture isolates your application, database, and supporting infrastructure from other users. This means fewer security vulnerabilities and a customizable environment with separate computing resources. However, this model won’t let you easily scale your resources once you identify inefficiencies.
• Multi-tenant SaaS architectures isolate your data, but you have to share software instances, computing resources, and datasets with other users. You get to use a complex and scalable infrastructure, which is also maintained by the provider.

3. Select a Cloud Service Provider

Certified cloud computing platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud provide SaaS infrastructures for healthcare organizations. They also offer out-of-the-box tools to help you automate processes, analyze data, and ensure regulatory compliance.

Most medical SaaS companies have multi-tenancy and single-tenancy architectures and flexible service packages for all types of healthcare companies.

4. Set Up an Authorization Server

An authorization server takes care of resource-heavy processes that happen every time someone tries to access your SaaS platform. The server must check credentials, affiliation, and process additional authentication mechanisms before granting an access token. This might happen hundreds or thousands of times a minute. So, it’s advisable to reduce the burden on your server with third-party rights management tools.

5. Develop an MVP

We recommend creating a minimal viable product (MVP) with essential functionality before building the full version of the platform. It helps gather feedback from your stakeholders, doctors, and real clients much faster, giving you more time to alter and adapt the system. After refining the core elements of your platform, you can add secondary features.

Technologies Needed to Develop a Healthcare SaaS Solution

The technologies you’ll need depend on the functionality and use cases of the SaaS healthcare product you want to build. But from our experience, this is the optimal SaaS tech stack with programming languages and backend frameworks:

• Python — a dynamic object-based programming language for scalable SaaS applications and data analytics systems
• React — a frontend library with robust DOM-manipulation tools and a big ecosystem of compatible frameworks and libraries to build rich web user interfaces
• React Native — a framework that allows developing mobile apps using React and JavaScript almost like web apps
• Node.js — a JavaScript runtime that helps build scalable apps with interruption-free concurrent connections between doctors and patients
• webRTC — technology for real-time peer-to-peer communications and video streaming

At the same time, you can always simplify development by using the backend as a service or function as a service.

Challenges of Developing Healthcare SaaS Platforms

Developing healthcare software is particularly complex due to the specifics of SaaS in the medical industry. Here are some of the issues you should pay special attention to.

Data Security

According to HIPAA Journal’s healthcare data breach analysis, approximately 133 million healthcare records were exposed or compromised in reported large-scale data breaches in the United States in 2023, representing a 156% increase compared with 2022. This exceeded the previous record of approximately 113 million records in 2015 and highlighted the growing need for secure healthcare software.

• Hackers accessed an external storage location used for email formatting, compromising 11,270,000 records at HCA Healthcare in Tennessee.
• PharMerica Corporation experienced a ransomware attack, which resulted in a data leak affecting 5,815,591 records. The attack was attributed to the Money Message ransomware group.
• A telehealth company, Cerebral Inc., faced an impermissible disclosure of PHI (Protected Health Information) through a Pixel tracking code on its website, affecting 3,179,835 records.

You should focus on security, implementing multi-factor authentication, access control, encryption and tokenization, log monitoring and intrusion detection tools, and data backup and recovery plans.

Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory compliance is a major consideration when developing healthcare SaaS platforms. In February 2023, the Federal Trade Commission announced its first enforcement action under the Health Breach Notification Rule, involving GoodRx and a proposed $1.5 million civil penalty over the unauthorized disclosure of consumers’ sensitive health information.

In May 2023, the FTC also announced an enforcement action against Premom, a fertility tracking app, over alleged violations of the same rule. These cases highlight the importance of privacy safeguards, responsible data sharing, and regulatory oversight for healthcare software providers.

Healthcare SaaS developers should ensure their software and organizational practices comply with applicable HIPAA Privacy and Security Rule requirements. Depending on the software’s intended use, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) may also apply to software regulated as a medical device. The FDA provides guidance on device software functions, including mobile medical applications.

Interoperability and Standardization

Healthcare organizations still face challenges exchanging data between systems. According to an ONC data brief, 70% of U.S. non-federal acute care hospitals engaged in all four interoperability domains — finding, sending, receiving, and integrating outside patient information — at least sometimes in 2023. However, only 43% routinely engaged in interoperable exchange, while 30% were not fully interoperable. The gap was particularly pronounced among independent hospitals: 55% were not fully interoperable, compared with 18% of system-affiliated hospitals.

Health SaaS companies can address these challenges by adopting Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a widely used standard for exchanging healthcare information. FHIR can help integrate legacy data into scalable SaaS environments, although successful implementation often requires an experienced development team.

Acropolium’s Expertise

A seasoned medical software developer understands what healthcare companies need (from chatbots to IoT solutions) and can help you build a SaaS product that provides real value to doctors, nurses, and patients.

Acropolium has done dozens of migrations (as well as software reengineering projects) and built many successful healthcare and fintech SaaS solutions. We can help your SaaS healthcare company develop custom software and support your migration to SaaS with minimal operational disturbances. Plus, our experts can pick the appropriate technology stack, provider, and security mechanisms for your needs.

What about healthcare SaaS examples? Our client, the US healthcare clinic, has adopted an advanced SaaS solution for appointment booking, integrating medical scheduling with electronic health records (EHR). This upgrade has significantly reduced patient no-shows by 30%, cut wait times by 25%, and increased patient access to medical records by 40%.

Final Thoughts

The SaaS cloud computing model offers a lower cost of ownership, limited initial capital expenses, and less infrastructure maintenance. Migrating your platform to the cloud can streamline data exchange and increase the performance of your software, enhancing the quality of patient care.

However, developing healthcare SaaS software solutions isn’t easy. Even with our migration guide, you can encounter technical, regulatory, or security challenges. That’s why it’s helpful to have a skilled partner by your side. Get in touch with our dedicated team so we can talk about IT outsourcing.