Healthcare SaaS: Trends and Solutions

Technology has greatly impacted healthcare SaaS, like every industry. From mapping a person’s genes to easily checking in for a doctor’s appointment on a tablet. SaaS product and engineering leaders have a unique challenge. They must be efficient and nimble, but data security is critical in the health SaaS industry.

We’ll look at various aspects of healthcare SaaS. This includes industry trends, the power of analytics in healthcare SaaS, a HIPPA compliance checklist and more.

What is Healthcare SaaS?

Healthcare SaaS (Software as a Service) refers to cloud-based software applications specifically designed for the healthcare industry. Users access these applications over the internet, typically through a web browser or mobile app. It eliminates the need for complex installations or on-premise hardware.

What is the market size for Healthcare SaaS?

Bigger than you might think. The healthcare SaaS market size is expected to grow to $48.78 billion in 2028 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.8%. 

Who Benefits from Healthcare SaaS?

SaaS in healthcare is not just for healthcare providers; their use extends beyond that key audience. We’ll look at how three user groups benefit.

Enhancing Care Delivery in Hospitals

Like many technology verticals, healthcare SaaS is rife with TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms.) Some common tools include:

• electronic medical records (EMRs)
• electronic health records (EHRs)
• revenue cycle management (RCM)
• telemedicine
• patient engagement
• practice management systems
• clinical documentation

Many healthcare hospital SaaS solutions can help manage patient flow and support clinical decision-making. These tools can improve the delivery of care for care providers and patients.

Hospitals and clinics have a plethora of technology for tracking healthcare vitals, administering meds, and more. They also need yet more technology to keep track of all that machinery. Functions include handling work order management, which is where Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) come in. 

Streamlining Operations for Payors, including Insurance Providers

Healthcare payors use SaaS apps for policy administration and billing, claims administration, workflow automation, and document management. HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) recently wrote about the revolutionary impacts of data standardization.

Improving data interoperability benefits payors. It makes billing more accurate and provides alerts to billing departments about potential under-coding issues. This helps protect revenue.

Empowering Patients

Logging into a portal to access personal files makes it easy to get copies of records. Portals help patients access test results and send messages to healthcare providers easily. This allows for convenient communication without long wait times on hold.

Patients can access their results and send messages whenever they want. This helps them avoid the frustration of waiting on hold for assistance.

Particularly when combined with robust, self-service analytics, healthcare SaaS can also enable personalized medical treatment.

Industry Trends Shaping Healthcare SaaS

Innovations such as cloud computing, data analytics, and mobile technologies have transformed the healthcare industry. The following trends are currently impacting healthcare beyond those larger trends.

Telemedicine

Virtual healthcare helps enhance health equity by delivering prompt treatment and clinical evaluations, particularly to the most marginalized communities. The U.S. telehealth market size was estimated at USD 29.6 billion for 2022. The expectation for growth is a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.9% from 2023 to 2030. Over 30% of healthcare providers utilize patient monitoring and virtual care services to enhance patient care and engagement.

Analytics and Machine Learning

On March 21, 2023, Bill Gates wrote, “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it.”

Healthcare SaaS is no exception. Jurgi Camblong, CEO and co-founder of SOPHiA GENETICS, wrote in Fast Company, “The ability for AI to translate someone’s entire genome into actionable insights that can inform a diagnosis and treatment plan will one day be the standard.”

Healthcare organizations face a challenge due to a lack of AI regulations. Camblong noted that AI technology will always outpace regulations. Those companies pioneering medical advancements with AI are responsible for careful and safe use of data.

Data Standardization

Data standardization for interoperability are now a requirement. Unfortunately, the problem of messy data is real. HIMSS describes it as, “one glaring issue [that] plagues the industry, casting a long shadow over patient care,” (source). 

Healthcare must overcome the critical hurdle of comprehensive data standardization to drive forward effectively. The industry has addressed this need by developing standards such as FHIR. These standards enable systems to exchange patient medical data in a standardized format easily.

Fortified Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is important for everyone, especially when using healthcare SaaS. Bloomberg Businessweek published a rather terrifying headline, “It’s Way Too Easy to Hack the Hospital. Firewalls and medical devices are extremely vulnerable, and everyone’s pointing fingers.” The article is no less haunting than the headline. 

Stealing healthcare information is a serious business. Maybe not as serious as hacking into a medical device that administers medicine through a tube thought. In 2023, there were 956 breaches accessing over 59 million patient records. That exceeds the 905 breaches in 2021.

The Power of Analytics in Healthcare SaaS

As in every industry, the sheer volume of healthcare data has exploded and continues to grow. However, many opportunities still exist to make use of the data. Better analytics can serve as the foundation for a solution for many healthcare SaaS challenges.

A recent HIMSS blog states, “In recent years, there has been an explosion in the amount of health data generated and collected. Health data is growing rapidly. This healthcare SaaS trend continues thanks to sources like electronic health records, medical imaging, genomics, sensors, and health apps. 

HIMSS also states that advanced data analytics in health informatics has already demonstrated enormous benefits across numerous domains.

Improved Clinical Outcomes

For clinical trials, medical SaaS companies rely on analytics to examine large data volumes. This is critical to spot trends early with comprehensive automation to analyze trial spending in real time.

This also aims to improve the quality of care. You can do this by collecting real-time patient feedback and analyzing outcomes as the data comes in. Alerts close the feedback loop in real-time as well.

Enhanced Decision-Making

Boost evidence-based decision-making is another important use case. By enabling researchers and policymakers to analyze vast amounts of clinical data to identify trends, evaluate treatment effectiveness, and develop guidelines for best practices.

Predictive Insights

Healthcare analytics software can also help medical practices predict patient outcomes and anticipate healthcare needs. Doctors can use information like medical records, prescriptions, and lifestyle data to identify high-risk patients. These patients may need more care or check-ups.

This proactive approach supports timely interventions, reducing hospital readmissions and improving patient satisfaction. With predictive analytics, healthcare service providers can forecast demand and supply, resulting in improved planning and resource allocation.

Operational Efficiency

While many healthcare providers are non-profit, they must still watch the bottom line. Most businesses have small profit margins. They must be efficient to maximize earnings and minimize expenses.

Analytics is a powerful tool for improving operational efficiency in the long term. Analyzing patient flow, staff productivity, and equipment usage can help identify problems in the system. These problems may include bottlenecks, delays, or waste. Many of the top healthcare SaaS companies depend on embedded analytics software to run their business.

By addressing these issues, you can improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Detect and Prevent Fraud

I thought the results of my Google search for “healthcare fraud costs” would be awful. I wasn’t disappointed.

• The General Accounting Office estimates that healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse may account for as much as 10% of all healthcare expenditures.
• The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA) estimates financial losses due to healthcare fraud. The estimates ranges from a conservative 3% to as high as 10% of total healthcare expenditures. That could mean more than $300 billion.

Analytics can help detect and prevent fraud and abuse by analyzing claims data to identify suspicious activities. These include billing issues, duplicate claims, or false diagnoses. This approach can save money for healthcare organizations as well as protect patients from unnecessary procedures or treatments.

Why Self-Service Analytics is the Game Changer for Healthcare SaaS

Product teams offering their users embedded analytics with their SaaS platform typically offer analytics in the following tiers.

1. Pre-canned reports as a starting point
2. Self-service dashboard building for custom reporting
3. Custom reports created by a professional services team

Self-service analytics allow the end user to select from a library of chart types. In addition, users connect to the data they need, establish parameters, and add visualizations to custom dashboards. SaaS vendors often charge a higher fee for these added capabilities, establishing additional revenue streams.

Self-service functionality also enables product management teams to reduce the number of feature requests from customers. Often product management teams are overwhelmed by reporting feature requests. Self-service reporting can solve the problem.

In a previous article, we discuss 7 benefits of a modern healthcare SaaS platform.

Democratize Data & Reduce Churn

Self-service analytics empower non-technical users to access and analyze data on their own. Whether you charge additional fees or not, embedded self-service analytics also boost customer retention, dramatically reducing churn.

Self-service reporting delivers actionable insight to end users, optimized to their particular workflow. Users who create and depend on custom reports for the information they need are less likely to churn. This improves customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Agility and Speed

The healthcare landscape is rapidly shifting, with new medications released, research published, and regulations issued and altered. Organizations must adapt quickly, and self-service analytics puts the power into users’ hands. They can generate reports that reveal insights to put new information into practice. Self-service enables faster response to critical questions, driving improved decision-making in near real-time.

Reduced IT Burden

End users can make their own visualizations using simple self-service tools. This eliminates the need to ask someone else to do it and wait for them. Empowering users with these tools frees up IT resources for more strategic tasks.

Checklist of HIPPA Compliance for Healthcare SaaS Applications

HIPAA compliance for SaaS companies in the healthcare sector is extensive. It involves a combination of technical safeguards, administrative policies, and physical security measures. Here’s a breakdown of the software feature requirements needed to achieve HIPAA compliance:

Access Control

• Granular User Permissions: Implement a system for assigning user roles and permissions. This enables you to assign varying levels of access to personal health information (PHI). Users should only be able to access the minimum data necessary for their specific role. Additionally, only an administrator on a given tenant should be able to create new uears.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Require strong authentication methods like MFA for all user logins. This adds an extra layer of security beyond just usernames and passwords.
• User Activity Logging: Log all user activity related to PHI access. This includes who accessed what data, when, and from where. This allows for auditing and identification of suspicious activity.
• Session Management: Implement session timeouts and automatic logouts for inactive users. This prevents unauthorized access because of unattended devices.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): This presents a new challenge for healthcare SaaS software solution to understand. This is one issue to watch.
• More than likely, companies wanting to incorporate AI with health records will have to anonymize data first. Then, looking at running LLM’s locally is another course of action to maintain data security. This is going to be costly in the short-term.

Data Security

• Encryption at Rest and in Transit: Encrypt all PHI stored within the application database. This covers both during transmission over the internet. Experts recommend industry-standard encryption algorithms like AES-256.
• Data Integrity Measures: Implement mechanisms to ensure the accuracy and completeness of PHI within the system. This could involve data validation checks and audit trails to track changes.
• Secure Data Backup and Recovery: Maintain secure backups of all data, including PHI, with a robust disaster recovery plan. Ensure data availability in case of outages or breaches as well.

Additional Features

• Audit Logging: Log all security-related events, including access attempts, failed logins, and data modifications. This allows for security monitoring and incident response.
• Data Minimization: The system should collect and store only the minimum amount of PHI necessary for its intended purpose. This reduces the attack surface and potential consequences of a data breach.
• De-identification Features: Consider offering functionality to de-identify PHI for specific use cases. Not all use cases require the full data access. This is especially true for reporting.
• Secure Communication Channels: Ensure all communication channels used to transmit PHI. If you use messaging or file-sharing features, they must comply with HIPAA regulations.

Remember: These are just some of the key software feature requirements. The specific features needed will depend on the nature of the SaaS application and the type of PHI it handles. More resources are available on the HHS.gov website.

Introducing Qrvey: The Perfect Fit for Healthcare SaaS with Embedded Analytics

Embedded analytics software like Qrvey will ensure that analytics functionality is scalable, secure, and compliant with healthcare SaaS solutions. Embedded analytics can help you improve your healthcare SaaS product’s usability and performance. Additionally, many companies use it to increase customer value and their ability to compete and win new business.

Qrvey’s multi-tenant analytics solution helps you avoid the challenges of creating your own solution. This allows you to offer a better product and service to your customers. Healthcare SaaS startups are especially vulnerable to building too much which often proves costly in the long run.

Deployed to Your Cloud Platform Environment

Qrvey is self-hosted in your cloud environment, enabling you to keep the Qrvey system within your control. As a cloud-native analytics platform, Qrvey is both scalable and cost-effective. Customers can install Qrvey on an unlimited number of environments because Qrvey is self-hosted. That includes international regions and testing/development environments.

Seamless Integration to SaaS Apps

Embedding a third-party product instead of building everything in-house offers many benefits. But your customers don’t need to know.

With Qrvey, you can customize your embedded analytics. You can change the appearance with CSS and themes. This will ensure that they fit well with your SaaS application. 

You can also seamlessly integrate analytics into your app with single sign-on. Furthermore, you will pass user permissions at the time of query so you’re not duplicating users.

Self-Service Analytics

With self-service analytics being a game changer for SaaS healthcare companies, your solution must natively include such functionality. Your team should be able to remain focused on your core competency, rather than building and maintaining it all. Check out more here.

Native Data Management Layer

Healthcare solutions often require various types of data – SQL, NoSQL, and unstructured data sources like forms and images. It’s vital to connect to any data source for a comprehensive analytics function. This includes FHIR analytics using patient health records. 

For comprehensive insights, Qrvey can analyze data from multiple healthcare data sources on a single dashboard. Qrvey makes it easy to ingest patient medical records in FHIR data format using a flexible API. Qrvey can use this data for healthcare analytics in its data lake.

Embrace the Power of Self-Service Analytics & Elevate Your Healthcare SaaS Offering

Embedded self-service analytics empowers non-technical users to access and analyze data on their own. This presents an amazing opportunity to boost customer retention and free up IT resources.

Self-service enables faster response to critical questions, driving improved decision-making in near real-time. By empowering users with actionable insights, healthcare providers can quickly put new information into practice.

If you want to learn more about Qrvey’s embedded analytics solution, contact us. We can provide a demo to show you how it can work for your product and get you started with a free POC.