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A Non-Developer’s Guide to Low-Code/ No-Code Software

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Introduction

The most pressing challenges that healthcare executives face are undoubtedly complex, from workforce shortages to compliance and regulatory hurdles to providing equal access to care. But to help address these and other issues and keep their facilities competitive as providers of exceptional care, these leaders must also stay one step ahead in another area where many aren’t comfortable: technological innovation.

The pressure to meet the digital needs of staff, clinicians and patients is intense, but developing the right software can be a long, draining, and costly process – exactly what organizations don’t need, given the accelerated pace of change in the industry. Luckily, low-code/no-code development provides an easier point of entry for non-technical healthcare leaders who need to scale solutions quickly and cost-effectively while retaining the ability to pivot as different needs arise.

The Emerging Role of Low Code/No Code in Healthcare

The Emerging Role of Low Code/No Code in Healthcare

According to PwC Health Research Institute, the health services industry in 2024 will see continuing economic compression. Costs associated with care and inflation rates are expected to rise, while securing top talent in a tight market remains a challenge. At the same time, hospitals and health systems face a patient population in search of personalized, convenient, and affordable care.

No code/low code enables the creation of high-quality and flexible solutions that meet patient and provider needs at organizations of all sizes. This simplified form of development can help streamline workflows, build patient-centric applications, and keep up with the rapid evolution of technology. 

Code is a set of rules or instructions for computer programs, from software and mobile applications to AI. Developers write code in various programming languages to create applications.  

This manual process requires not only individuals with technical skills, but also coordination and collaboration where stakeholders share what they need from their ideal solution with developers, who then turn that vision into code to create a custom program. Beyond investments of time and skill, it’s costly to build an application from the ground up.  

So, what is no-code development? Though the name suggests otherwise, a no-code application has code – but you don’t need to understand how to code to build the application. This is because no-code development platforms have entirely visual interfaces. They include modules and templates that you drag and drop into the application as you build it.  

Low code has the same drag-and-drop capabilities, but you can also customize applications by manually adding code.  

Software engineers — the developers who design, develop, and test code for everything from applications to network control systems — are in high demand. Competition to hire and retain them is steep, owing to a skills gap and personnel shortage. With no code/low code, healthcare organizations can save money on costly recruitment efforts. 

No-code platforms eliminate the need for technical expertise entirely, allowing decision makers and end users to easily collaborate on must-have features. From there, anyone can add elements directly into the application.  

You can also adjust the software on the fly. For example, in a no-code platform, underused features can be removed with a single click or dragged elsewhere in the workflow where they may be used more. This allows real-time workflow testing and optimization.  

Low code allows healthcare organizations to alter or add to existing templates by customizing code. For example, you could make a pre-configured scheduling module more robust by adding an AI algorithm to better automate the patient-provider matching process. This flexibility is great if you have some existing technical expertise and would like a solution tailored to your organization’s specific use cases.

No code/low code boosts operational efficiency and empowers both staff and patients in numerous ways:

  • Simplified solution building. No-code/low-code platforms are especially helpful for eliminating administrative bottlenecks and streamlining overly involved healthcare workflows.  
  • Cost savings. Resources that would previously go to development can be rerouted to better support patient care and staff needs.  
  • Fast application launches. It’s essential for healthcare organizations to develop technical solutions quickly. Time to launch is faster than ever with no code/low code.  
  • Smooth software evolution. With no-code/low-code platforms, teams can make fast adjustments to better meet changing needs and expectations for patient care.  
  • Creation of patient-centric solutions. Personalizing and curating dedicated patient experiences is also simpler. Patient-requested features can be quickly implemented.  
  • Reduced maintenance burden. Security is stronger when you leverage a pre-built system, with everything already tested and hardened. Top solutions often have compliance and governance built in.  
  • Optimization of development resources. Low-code solutions allow developers to skip initial builds and focus on tailoring existing features to the unique needs of the organization.

According to Deloitte, health systems that focus on integrating digital tools into care models and redesigning workflows may have a better chance of advancing the patient and provider experience. However, rebuilding from the ground up is not an option for most healthcare facilities.

The low-code/no-code approach lowers barriers to healthcare software development. For healthcare leaders looking to ease the burden on staff while exceeding patient expectations, no code/low code might be the differentiating factor they need to keep pace with technological innovation and stay one step ahead of the competition.

In traditional healthcare app development, wires can get crossed as individuals with different levels of technical skill collaborate. Team leaders may not know how to convey what they need to developers, leading to costly disconnects and delays and strained working relationships. 

No code/low code can support improved cross-functional collaboration while delivering better and more agile solutions.  

Whether you’re outsourcing development or using internal resources, building a new app requires all parties to work together seamlessly. However, what end users need and what is technically possible for developers to build often doesn’t align.   

No code/low code allows anyone to be a “business developer” — someone who isn’t technically savvy but knows the issues facing the team. By seeing how the parts of the application are laid out visually in a no-code setting, they can more easily identify what end users require and how the solution can meet their needs, then drag and drop in features.  

On the low-code side, business developers can request that engineers add feature improvements, such as a more robust dashboard. The engineers can then add code that pulls data from more sources, enabling users to make better data-driven decisions. 

With these approaches to software development, there’s no longer a technical language barrier, and all parties can provide input. The result is often a more effective and widely adopted solution. 

In addition to creating a more even playing field where business developers and IT staff can collectively drive new software forward.

Here are a few other ways these platforms can encourage better partnerships across the organization:

Collaboration

The flexibility and plug-and-play nature of no-code/low-code technology provides an opportunity for smoother communication thanks to intuitive visual interfaces, drag-and-drop functionality, and interactive workflows that make it easy to adjust on the fly and implement feedback in real time. Users can test new features immediately, allowing for faster optimization.

Faster launch

No-code/low-code platforms can help your team swiftly create and implement effective digital experiences, bypassing delays stemming from internal ambiguity or changing requirements. The flexibility to adjust the workflow also speeds up the time it takes to get new functionality into users’ hands.

Reduce shadow IT

According to TechTarget, shadow IT is when employees ignore IT policies and procedures and use the technology they want because of frustration around slow IT response times, tedious rules, or dislike for required devices and solutions. This is highly dangerous in healthcare, because it can both expose sensitive patient data to cybercriminals and open up compliance challenges that lead to fines and lawsuits.

No-code/low-code healthcare app development enables input from all stakeholders, driving adoption, easing compliance, streamlining workflows, and promoting user satisfaction by ensuring unified, approved tooling.

Meet needs

There’s no limit to how many stakeholders can be involved in no-code/low-code development, which ensures that all teams’ needs are accounted for, met, and weighed against larger organizational goals.

At the end of the day, your internal team members must trust one another to meet organizational goals. The same can be said of external relationships — when vetting a vendor, make sure they listen to your needs and feedback, and you’ll have the foundation for a fruitful partnership.

Healthcare Use Cases for Low-Code/No-Code Development

Healthcare Use Cases for Low-Code/No-Code Development

Both patients and healthcare employees often perceive the industry as slow to adapt, encountering delays, troubleshooting issues, and confusion. They demand better tools, yet developing new solutions using old, time-consuming, and costly methods is risky, as the result may be dated or ineffective. Low-code/no-code development offers a malleable, modern approach to engaging patients effectively and enhancing internal operations and employee productivity.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people who are active participants in their care attain better health outcomes.

A Journal of Patient Experience study explains that patient engagement:  

  • Leads to behaviors that improve health, contributing to better outcomes and lower long-term costs.
  • Can enhance care quality and improve service delivery when patient education and self-management support are prioritized.
  • Promotes medication routine adherence and increases the likelihood of pursuing preventive care, like immunizations and routine appointments.

Organizations are using digital tools to boost patient engagement, offering greater control over treatment while also reducing administrative burdens for providers. However, a gap exists between software development and patient needs, leading to low adoption rates and impacting return on investment due to the cost and time involved in development.

How can you create software that patients will use? No-code software development.

No code’s agility can help organizations meet the most pervasive engagement challenges with ease. Here’s how: 

  • Create engaging, patient-friendly solutions

    Understanding patient needs is vital in creating patient-centric solutions. According to KLAS Research’s Patient Perspectives on Patient Engagement Technology 2022 report, patients valued the following in digital health tools.
    patient values stats
    No-code platforms offer pre-built components for these features that can be easily chosen and dragged and dropped into the application, simplifying development and prioritization. 

  • Reduce wait times for in-demand tools

    No-code development facilitates rapid adaptation to evolving technology and patient expectations. With pre-built and pre-configured components, stakeholders don’t have to worry about integration delays and other holdups, enabling faster app development and deployment. 

  • Continually expand and scale capabilities

    Once your digital experience is refined and patient engagement increases, you can trial new capabilities easily with no-code platforms and observe patient response. Initial evaluation periods may uncover new problems that patients may not have known they had, which can be speedily addressed by visualizing and pulling in preconfigured features and modules ranging from advanced alert systems to educational videos. As your organization grows, the no-code platform scales as well. Low-code tools offer additional customization by allowing updates to existing modules and features.

A Non-Developer’s Guide to Low-Code/No-Code Software

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As healthcare technology evolves, workflows become more complex and the demands of various stakeholders lead to fragmented digital environments. Though some advances like telehealth have revolutionized care, the proliferation of point solutions has given organizations too many disparate tools.  

No-code software development can help bring focus back to where it belongs: the patient. The ability to rapidly deploy applications, personalize them to the needs of patients, and provide numerous options for features that quickly adapt to their changing preferences is critical to empowering the people who walk through your doors and delivering more effective care. 

All this said, the clinical team experience needs to be considered when developing healthcare applications, too. Software should ease administrative burdens and streamline workflows. The improvements it brings can drive better care delivery and outcomes and help optimize the quality and efficiency of clinical operations. Traditional medical software development, however, can be cumbersome and costly. 

No-code/low-code software development takes a more accessible approach to building the digital tools providers need. 

Here’s how it supports both operations and clinical decision support:

Faster workflow

Automating healthcare workflows creates a direct path to efficiency, but teams across a healthcare organization must agree to a process that works for all parties. Usually this requires expensive tweaks and updates, but with flexible no-code/low-code tools, non-technical users can provide input at the design stage and preferred features can be dragged and dropped into the workflow. Workflows can be stood up quickly, allowing providers to spend more time in direct patient care, and updates can be more easily implemented as users provide feedback.

Patient management

No-code/low-code solutions improve patient management by seamlessly integrating with electronic health records, ensuring up-to-date patient records are available when providers need to double-check information like prescribed medications and allergies. This eliminates the need to manually upload and review data, enhances decision-making and care delivery, facilitates information sharing and care coordination, and reduces manual data tasks for clinical teams.

Decision support

According to a study in NPJ Digital Medicine, clinical decision support systems assist healthcare providers in decisions related to diagnoses, care, administration, clinical management, and more. But they’re not without pitfalls.

No-code/low-code platforms can help avoid these pitfalls. For example, data quality can be hampered by poorly designed systems and a lack of a standardized process for data collection. With a no-code/low-code approach, clinical data repositories can be centralized, ensuring that the most current information on diagnoses and treatment plans as well as rules and protocols are available.

No-code/low-code software can also simplify integration and ongoing maintenance for clinical support systems that often struggle with interoperability and connectivity between systems. 

Program scaling

Healthcare programs must be adaptable for various scenarios like sudden patient influxes, mergers, or facility closures. No-code/low-code medical software development offers agile scalability. Features can be added, removed, or adjusted easily, enabling speedy deployment and flexibility for experimentation with advancements like AI. These solutions also accommodate changes in user volume, organizational shifts, and optimization efforts. 

Here are a few real-world examples of no code/low code in action: 

  • A leading U.S. medical insurance group faced a complex referral-to-surgery workflow, burdening providers with process complications and nurses with manual processing of 150 referrals monthly. Elxo implemented a low-code automation solution for 1,500+ patients and 30 staff, featuring tracking of where patients were in the workflow. This streamlined process optimized resources and accelerated referrals. With low-code enablement, there’s also room to build out the solution, scale it, and customize it for other service lines. 
  • Clinical decision-making requires the study of data and information in various formats, and a no-code solution can create helpful data visualizations and dashboards. Unlike custom-built data analytics tools, which require extensive integration efforts, platforms designed using no-code medical software development offer flexible architecture for simplified integrations. This enables easy connection of data sources, visualization and report generation, and organizationwide insight sharing. 

No-code/low-code automation, and even custom medical software development, can help healthcare organizations build tools that improve both the patient and the provider experience – but your options don’t end there.

Identifying the Right Approach to Low Code/No Code

Identifying the Right Approach to Low Code/No Code

Choosing the right software development approach is crucial to the success of your healthcare organization. You need a solution that’s fast to develop and deploy, cost-effective, scalable, secure, and seamlessly integrable with existing systems. Balancing these requirements can be challenging and have lasting impacts on your organization. We’re here to help navigate these considerations, explore advantages and limitations of low-code/no-code and custom solutions, and chart the best path forward for your providers and patients.

Building software in-house is slow, expensive, and complex, requiring experienced developers. On the other hand, no-code tools are affordable, can be deployed quickly, and empower any user to create workflows, albeit with limited long-term growth potential. Low-code tools offer a middle ground by allowing in-house developers to manipulate code to some extent.  

However, the optimal approach lies in a combination of these approaches: custom-built software with integrated low-code/no-code functionality. This approach – which ideally involves partnering with a vendor – provides the benefits of in-house development without the coding burden, along with the ease of use and rapid scalability of low-code/no-code platforms.  

The agility to quickly modify the software with low-code/no-code functionality is particularly helpful in health systems where multiple service lines express a need for a similar solution. A combination of custom and low-code software development also ensures better security and storage by combining the strengths of all three development models. Let's delve into each platform's limitations to determine if this approach is right for your organization.

Here’s a quick glance at how these approaches compare to one another:

Comparing custom, low-code, and no-code integration platforms

Before investing in a solution, prioritize security alongside the above factors and ensure that the software aligns with healthcare industry regulations like the HIPAA Security Rule.  

In-house development offers full control over all source code and security but requires expertise to implement. When partnering with a vendor, regardless of the development approach, you must thoroughly vet their security measures.  

Custom healthcare software development may be suitable if your organization requires scalability, rapid deployment, flexible integrations, and tailored design. Assess your team, resources, and project complexity to determine if a custom platform is the best fit.

When partnering with a software developer, especially in the healthcare industry with its complicated security, regulatory, and technological landscape, trust is paramount. It’s vital to select a partner with a proven track record in designing secure software, integrating no-code/low-code functionality, customizing for diverse use cases, and providing ongoing support. 

Elxo offers consultative services tailored to healthcare organizations' needs, delivering custom software solutions that are scalable across service lines and alongside facilities’ population growth.  

For instance, Elxo developed a custom bariatrics application for a leading medical and health insurance group with both clinic and patient views. The application features a user-friendly, no-code administrative module that enables easy patient view updates without extensive development resources. This means a user who needs to add a new educational video, for example, only has to add a new tile for the video in the relevant section – and patients can view it instantly. This functionality can also be used in the clinic view, allowing advanced workflow curation. 

This example demonstrates how swiftly no-code tools can enhance patient experiences and reduce provider burden while saving time and costs. Partnering with the right vendor can help overcome challenges associated with fully custom software development, such as long development cycles and bloated budgets.

Developing healthcare software means constantly keeping pace with not only technological advancements, but also rising patient, staff, and clinician expectations and changing needs and demands. Low-code no-code platforms are simplifying the path to building effective software, but is it worth it to go it alone, or should you partner with a vendor? Let’s explore your options, the critical factors in making the right decision for your organization, and what makes the ideal partner for your development journey. 

When assessing your organization’s capacity for software development, there are three top considerations: technical expertise, budget, and time.

  • Conventional development requires extensive coding experience, a full developer team, and input from stakeholders from across the organization. While this approach offers maximum customizability, it comes with a high cost and time investment because of the talent, work, and maintenance it demands. 
  • Low-code development involves less hands-on coding, allows business developers to drag and drop features into place, and has some room for manual customization. As a result, applications can be deployed more quickly, with less money spent on technically skilled personnel. 
  • No-code development requires no programming skills, enabling rapid deployment and low maintenance, but also less flexibility to tweak or add code. Those trade-offs result in the least expensive and fastest development.

By assessing your organization's resources in these three categories, you can better determine which development model suits your needs.

Partnering with a consultancy can offer invaluable support and expertise, whether you have a clear vision for your application or are unsure where to begin. By leveraging their network and experience, consultancies can keep development on track, handle maintenance, and more. 

Consider how much you want to relieve your staff's burden. The more your team takes on, the higher the operational costs and resource dedication for development and maintenance. Partnering with a low-code developer, a no-code agency, or a consultancy for a custom build allows you to rely on their expertise rather than test your employees’ limits. 

Vendors specializing in low-code no-code platforms understand their tools inside and out. This expertise allows them to focus on building excellent user experiences, freeing your clinicians to prioritize patient care and stronger clinical decision-making. Additionally, leaders can optimize staff resources and focus on strategic tasks. 

Choosing the right partner, whether it's a low-code vendor or a no-code agency, is crucial to maximizing the impact of your project.

Beyond factors like time, cost, and resource savings, when vetting vendors, it’s also crucial to understand the quality of the software they develop. 

A Health Systems (Basingstoke) assessment highlights the urgent need to verify and validate healthcare software quality. Malfunctions and errors can compromise clinical decisions, jeopardize data security, and hinder performance. Given the stakes involved, finding the right software is crucial for patient safety and efficient care delivery. 

To understand a partner’s value and evaluate their commitment to software quality, be sure to review their capabilities and prepare a thorough question list.

When vetting vendor capabilities, consider:

  • Technical specifications. Ensure compatibility and interoperability with existing systems like electronic health records. 
  • Emphasis on patient-centric care. Look for emphasis on patient-friendly tools and experiences.  
  • Experience. Evaluate prior work and integration expertise.  
  • Security certifications. Verify adherence to strict data privacy standards. 
  • Case studies. Review examples from similar organizations. 
  • Consultative services. Determine if additional expertise and consultation is needed for your project.

You also may want to consider creating a list of essential features, preferred capabilities, and future needs to narrow down your options. Remember to look at the long term and what features you may not need now but could eventually use as your organization grows. 

Here are a few key questions to ask vendors:

  • How do you collaborate? How can we contact your team for support? What do you consider constructive feedback?

  • How quickly do you design, build, and deploy the software? What’s the estimated timeline and milestones?

  • How scalable are your low-code no-code platforms? Can adjustments or expansions be made easily? How do you stay current on industry advancements?

  • What kind of learning curve does your software have? When can users expect to be up and running? How much training is necessary?

  • How reliable is the software? What are your uptime rates and maintenance plans?

  • What safety measures are in place? How do you ensure data governance and privacy?

  • What’s the cost estimate? Are there any additional or long-term fees? 

It can feel overwhelming to go it alone and build software that solves all your needs in a complicated healthcare landscape, but you can identify a great partner who listens to and understands your needs by asking these and other questions that zero in on your unique situation. That trust is the foundation for deploying software your patients and providers demand and that will grow with them as their needs evolve. 

A Low-Code/No-Code Vendor That Empowers Patients and Employees

Elxo firmly believes in the importance of empowering patients during their care journeys and optimizing the processes and workflows involved in care operations to provide a superior experience for patients, staff, and clinicians.  

We understand that healthcare leaders can’t be expected to have the answers to all the problems their organization faces, nor fully comprehend the full extent of new challenges ahead. That’s why we consult with stakeholders across your facilities to provide expert guidance and customize solutions to their specific needs, while building in low-code/no-code capabilities that entrust users with future updates as your company scales.

Ready to get started? Reach out today. 
A Non-Developer’s Guide to Low-Code/No-Code Software

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