Everybody needs HealthCare at some point of their lives. There’s a growing need for a health care system where patients (also read as Consumers) can securely log in to a portal and find out when was their last doctor’s visit, check on their lab results, schedule/re-schedule appointments, view their medical history, check on their prescriptions etc. Providing a solution that is so feature-rich and yet cost-effective is where Drupal shines.

Let us delve deeper into some of the challenges that the health care industry faces world-wide and how Drupal can help to overcome them and prove to be one of the best solutions towards a systematic approach on quality HealthCare.

Interoperability between health organizations

Healthcare organizations need to be able to exchange patient information to be able to assure quality and minimize any medical errors.

So since Drupal is a free and open-source platform which is also extremely simple to work on, many health care providers are implementing it and a lot of them already have. This makes it easier to transfer patient documents from one health organization to another, thereby solving the interoperability issue.

Changes in workflow

Adopting a completely new system will mean making critical and huge changes to your existing workflow to be more suitable.

Being a highly flexible platform, Drupal can conform to any workflow with just some minor configurations. Drupal supports a configurable workflow system that can be programmed and administratively overwritten.

Integrations with third party APIs

Health Care web applications need to integrate with third party APIs to be able to connect better to databases of information and to link between different sectors of health care for smooth transmission of information.

Drupal is supremely extensible and can integrate with third party API’s seamlessly and efficiently. For an experienced Drupal developer, it is very easy to write API’s and create custom integration points for any third party platform.

Security Issues?

With a number of critical health information being passed on from one health sector to another, there’s an absolute necessity for this information to be secure and to avoid privacy violations.

Drupal is famously known for the security it provides and this is proven when government sites like the Whitehouse, Department of Defence (DOD), NASA, etc. are powered by Drupal. A high level of permission control can be set to be able to access sections of the website. These security permissions are also truly customizable to suit your exact security requirements.

The Impact of the Acts

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, Affordable Care Act and Meaningful Use are administration mandates passed in 2009 in the United States of America that promotes the use of IT in the health industry. All health care providers across the U.S were encouraged to adopt an interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHR) system to improve the quality of health care, reduce medical errors, reduced costs etc.

However, implementing EHRs means higher expenses, workflow changes, loss of productivity temporarily during adoption of the EHR system and many more challenges that the healthcare industry would have to face. Drupal is not only a Content Management System but an extremely powerful tool to build superior quality web applications at a low cost.

Expensive EHR providers

Let’s face it. EHR systems are expensive, sometimes costing millions of dollars up front. There are a lot of overheads like hardware costs (servers and computers), software costs, training costs, maintenance costs etc., which a healthcare organization will need to splurge on.

Drupal to the rescue. Being an open-source platform, development costs are drastically reduced while the quality and stability of the website soars high. There are over thousands of contributed modules that are free and that are specifically built for the healthcare industry, thus also reducing development time.