Telehealth Software for Nursing Care
All-Around Overview
Relying on 18 years of experience in healthcare IT, ScienceSoft designs and builds convenient telenursing products and helps healthcare providers implement reliable custom telenursing solutions.
Telenursing Essence
Using telehealth, nursing staff provides remote care, health state monitoring, and consultations on symptoms, disease management, rehabilitation, etc. Telenursing helps mitigate staffing issues and reduce re-admissions by 31% while ensuring continuous patient monitoring and care management.
Telenursing Market Overview
In 2022, the telemedicine market is estimated at $71.97 billion. By 2032, it is expected to amount to $244.21 billion, growing at a CAGR of 12.9%. The market growth is associated with the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, support of telehealth initiatives by authorities, and the need to save costs. Telehealth technology for nursing practice has become one of the key telemedicine directions due to the increased number of patients, nursing staff shortage, and work overload.
How Telenursing Works
Architecture
At the core of the telenursing platform, there is a cloud server with a data storage and processing module and a video streaming server. The former collects and handles for patient-related data (e.g., telenursing calls history, contact information, health records), telenursing staff data, images shared by patients and nurses in the app (e.g., photos of wounds), video calls recordings, etc. The latter enables real-time video communication between patients and nurses.
Other key modules of a telenursing solution include:
App for patients
including such features as nurse video visit scheduling, vitals entry, chat with a nurse, self-help guides, etc.
Admin web panel
to view a telenursing staff list, grant app access to patients and nurses, etc. (used by nursing supervisors, nurse practitioners, administrators of home care organizations).
App for nurses
featuring a patient list, patient health history, patient vitals tracker, nurse video visit request scheduling and approval, instant messaging with patients, etc.
A telenursing application can be integrated with EHR/EMR, CRM, hospital information system (HIS), and smart devices for patients, including wearables. By collecting data from the devices, the app enables a nurse to track a patient’s vitals (e.g., blood glucose level, blood pressure) and monitor a patient’s health state in real time without manually entering this data.
Preoperative and postoperative patient care
Nurses track patients’ vitals using connected devices and guide patients through surgery preparation via video calls. After surgery, nurses assess patient recovery during e-visits and identify complications using photos and wearable device data.
Telenursing helps manage symptoms and track patients’ vitals, enhances care plan adherence, and enables nurses to support patients in symptom alleviation remotely.
A telehealth app provides nurses with real-time information about the health state of elderly patients or patients with special needs, and helps coordinate and adjust home care.
Pregnancy monitoring and newborn care
Via telehealth, nurses help patients navigate pregnancy, conduct childbirth preparation courses, and monitor parents’ and babies’ vitals.
Video calls with a psychiatric nurse help monitor medication adherence, timely identify and alleviate symptoms of mental health disorders, and promote healthy coping mechanisms among patients.
Do nurses need certifications to provide telehealth care?
American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and the American Academy of Ambulatory Care Nursing (AAACN) do not recognize telehealth nursing as a separate nursing practice or subspecialty. In other words, telenursing can be easily implemented into everyday practice because nurses do not need additional certifications to use such apps.
Live video conferencing
Patients join online appointments with a nurse to discuss their health state and test results, get instructions on care and pre-surgical preparation, etc. In case of emergency, patients can also call an on-duty nurse.
Remote patient monitoring
Nurses track and assess patients’ vitals (collected by devices like biosensors, glucose meters, etc., or entered manually) and escalate the potential issues to the doctors.
Сhat consultations
A patient can message a nurse to ask for medical advice (e.g., how to care for an injury) or to be referred to the right specialist.
Image and video sharing
By exchanging photos and videos with patients, nursing staff checks the healing process, monitors medication side effects, or shares instructions (bandage changing, exercise).
Nurse peer-to-peer support
Via a telenursing app, a nurse can contact an experienced colleague to discuss the unusual symptoms or complications.
Self-help guides for patients
An app can provide access to educational videos, first aid or exercise tutorials, and condition-related lifestyle advice for patients.
See How It Works in Real Life
Check Out Our Telehealth App Demo
Explore opportunities that a telehealth app provides to foster continuous and impactful communication between patients and healthcare professionals.
Explore a Telehealth App with Remote Patient Monitoring
In the app demo, we show how the automated collection of health parameters, vitals analysis, and identification of symptom patterns contribute to advanced patient care.
Telehealth Nursing Challenges and Solutions
Challenge #1
Using a telenursing app can be challenging for some groups of patients, e.g., elderly patients. Treatment adherence may be hindered by a lack of positive reinforcement.
Check out the solution
Solution
While planning the application, focus on clear and user-friendly UI that won’t require additional user training. To verify that the interface is intuitive and easy-to-understand, allocate additional resources for usability testing. To motivate patients to use the app, ScienceSoft suggests implementing gamification techniques and in-app notifications to remind them of scheduled e-visits or regular vitals entry.
HIDE
Challenge #2
Using a telenursing app can be challenging for some groups of patients, e.g., elderly patients. Treatment adherence may be hindered by a lack of positive reinforcement.
Check out the solution
Solution
HIPAA-compliant clouds (e.g., AWS, Azure) provide a secure environment for building a telenursing application, including EHR data storage in an encrypted database, storage of real-time patient monitoring data in the encrypted form, identity and access management, network and application firewalls, and more.
HIDE
Saint Luke's Health System, Missouri, introduced a program aimed at having virtual nurses supporting bedside nurses. The telehealth nurses took over non-hands-on care, education, documentation, admission, discharge, answering questions, reviewing the care plan, and more. As a result, patient and nurse satisfaction increased, and patients are now discharged within two hours of the discharge order (20% faster than in other hospital units).
Cleveland Clinic, a health system with several US and international locations, launched a telemedicine service that allows patients to get second opinions on their care and treatment plan. The program is run by nurse care managers who record additional patient health information and provide updates on the status of patients’ cases. As a result, 72% of secondary opinions identified a potential diagnosis change or treatment plan modifications.
BrightView Health, a behavioral health system with outpatient centers in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and Delaware, launched a new EHR-integrated telehealth platform for their counseling and nursing teams in 2020. From Jan. to Nov. 2022, they doubled the 2021 telehealth visits record with over 1,300 online appointments.
Lee Health, Florida, implemented an EHR-integrated telemedicine solution with remote patient monitoring functionality. The system collects home patient data; designated nurses analyze it and escalate the cases if needed. Previously, 17% of remotely monitored patients needed a higher level of care, and now the numbers decreased to 3%-5%.
Do You Need a Custom Telenursing App?
To determine whether you should consider implementing a custom-made telenursing solution, answer a few simple questions from ScienceSoft’s healthcare IT team.
Do you need a solution that is specialized for your nursing practice? For example, it should follow the workflows of your healthcare organization, be tailored to a specific healthcare field (e.g., geriatric care, mental health, physical therapy).
Do you have a complex IT environment and need the telenursing app to be seamlessly integrated with your other software systems?
Do you need to implement advanced technologies or specialized capabilities? For example, voice recognition, image analysis, AI chatbots for patient support, or specific accessibility features.
Do you want to integrate your telehealth app with medical devices (heart rate monitors, glucose meters, etc.) to enable automated remote patient monitoring?
Should your telehealth app include a multilingual interface and automatic translation of in-app messages?
Tell us more about your needs
Please answer at least one question to help us better understand your business objectives.
A ready-made app will be more cost-effective
An out-of-the-box solution will likely suit your organization’s needs just fine. If you need expert guidance to choose and implement the best-fitting telenursing app, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
A custom telenursing app is the best fit!
Based on the needs you shared, it looks like a custom telenursing app is the best option for you. ScienceSoft’s healthcare IT experts are ready to help you define the software requirements, design a robust architecture, and fully develop your solution.
Cost Drivers and Investments
General investment size factors
- Complexity and quantity of telenursing app functions (e.g., text chats, videoconferencing, chatbots, connected smart devices, VoIP communication, etc.).
- Number and complexity of needed integrations with third-party software (e.g., EHR/EMR, CRM, HIS).
Additional investment size factors
Connected medical devices (glucometers, biosensors, stethoscopes, pulse oximeters, etc.).
Operational costs
- Cloud services used in the telenursing app.
- Higher bandwidth for quality video consultations.
Based on ScienceSoft’s experience, the cost of a telemedicine nursing solution for healthcare providers ranges from $150,000 to $200,000+. Telehealth solutions generally reach 100% ROI in ~6-12 months (depending on the number of telenursing appointments, number of monitored patients, etc.). To develop an advanced telenursing software product, you will need from $250,000 to $300,000+ in investments.
Want to understand the cost of your telehealth software for nursing care?
Technologies ScienceSoft Uses to Build Reliable Telenursing Platforms
Clouds
Cloud databases, warehouses and storage
AWS
We use Amazon Redshift to build cost-effective data warehouses that easily handle complex queries and large amounts of data.
We use Amazon DynamoDB as a NoSQL database service for solutions that require low latency, high scalability and always available data.
Azure
We leverage Azure Cosmos DB to implement a multi-model, globally distributed, elastic NoSQL database on the cloud. Our team used Cosmos DB in a connected car solution for one of the world’s technology leaders.
Azure SQL Database is great for handling large volumes of data and varying database traffic: it easily scales up and down without any downtime or disruption to the applications. It also offers automatic backups and point-in-time recoveries to protect databases from accidental corruption or deletion.
Google Cloud Platform
We use Google Cloud Datastore to set up a highly scalable and cost-effective solution for storing and managing NoSQL data structures. This database can be easily integrated with other Google Cloud services (BigQuery, Kubernetes, and many more).
Video
Streaming
Messaging and conferencing
Back-end programming languages
Practice
19 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
60+
Our .NET developers can build sustainable and high-performing apps up to 2x faster due to outstanding .NET proficiency and high productivity.
Practice
25 years
Projects
110+
Workforce
40+
ScienceSoft's Java developers build secure, resilient and efficient cloud-native and cloud-only software of any complexity and successfully modernize legacy software solutions.
Practice
10 years
Projects
50+
Workforce
30
ScienceSoft's Python developers and data scientists excel at building general-purpose Python apps, big data and IoT platforms, AI and ML-based apps, and BI solutions.
Practice
10 years
Workforce
100
ScienceSoft delivers cloud-native, real-time web and mobile apps, web servers, and custom APIs ~1.5–2x faster than other software developers.
Practice
16 years
Projects
170
Workforce
55
ScienceSoft's PHP developers helped to build Viber. Their recent projects: an IoT fleet management solution used by 2,000+ corporate clients and an award-winning remote patient monitoring solution.
Practice
4 years
ScienceSoft's developers use Go to build robust cloud-native, microservices-based applications that leverage advanced techs — IoT, big data, AI, ML, blockchain.
Front-end programming languages
Languages
Practice
21 years
Projects
2,200+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft uses JavaScript’s versatile ecosystem of frameworks to create dynamic and interactive user experience in web and mobile apps.
JavaScript frameworks
Practice
13 years
Workforce
100+
ScienceSoft leverages code reusability Angular is notable for to create large-scale apps. We chose Angular for a banking app with 3M+ users.
Workforce
80+
ScienceSoft achieves 20–50% faster React development and 50–90% fewer front-end performance issues due to smart implementation of reusable components and strict adherence to coding best practices.
ScienceSoft uses Meteor for rapid full-stack development of web, mobile and desktop apps.
By using a lightweight Vue framework, ScienceSoft creates high-performant apps with real-time rendering.
With Next.js, ScienceSoft creates SEO-friendly apps and achieves the fastest performance for apps with decoupled architecture.
When working with Ember.js, ScienceSoft creates reusable components to speed up development and avoid code redundancy.
Mobile
Practice
16 years
Projects
150+
Workforce
50+
ScienceSoft’s achieves 20–50% cost reduction for iOS projects due to excellent self-management and Agile skills of the team. The quality is never compromised — our iOS apps are highly rated.
Practice
14 years
Projects
200+
Workforce
50+
There are award-winning Android apps in ScienceSoft’s portfolio. Among the most prominent projects is the 5-year-long development of Viber, a messaging and VoIP app for 1.8B users.
Practice
11 years
Projects
85+
Workforce
10+
ScienceSoft cuts the cost of mobile projects twice by building functional and user-friendly cross-platform apps with Xamarin.
ScienceSoft uses Cordova to create cross-platform apps and avoid high project costs that may come with native mobile development.
ScienceSoft takes the best from native mobile and web apps and creates the ultimate user experience in PWA.
Practice
8 years
Projects
300+
ScienceSoft reduces up to 50% of project costs and time by creating cross-platform apps that run smoothly on web, Android and iOS.
ScienceSoft will save you from double or even triple expenses associated with platform-specific coding by creating cross-platform apps in Flutter.
With Ionic, ScienceSoft creates a single app codebase for web and mobile platforms and thus expands the audience of created apps to billions of users at the best cost.
ScienceSoft brings in 18 years of experience in healthcare software development to help you implement high-quality software for remote nursing care.
Telenursing consulting
ScienceSoft’s healthcare IT experts will define the telenursing app features, architecture, and tech stack based on your business needs. Within 3-6 weeks, you’ll get a comprehensive business case with costs, ROI, and payback period.
Telenursing application development
With a passionate team of 750+ IT professionals on board, we are ready to launch the development of your custom telenursing app and deliver a fully functional MVP in just 2-4 months.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a US-headquartered IT consulting and software development vendor with 34years of experience. Holding ISO 13485 certification and being experienced in the development of HIPAA-compliant software, ScienceSoft develops reliable telemedicine software for various use cases, icluding nursing care.