Low code application platforms (LCAP) or what we generally call low code technology has gained quite a bit of importance in the last few years. Tech firms have started offering solutions and services using low code technology, academia is also gearing up for the challenge by partnering with low code application platform companies. There is a lot of buzz in the industry as IT professionals are now preferring to work on low code platforms and getting trained to be abreast with the market. However, most new technologies carry with them highly inflated expectations and while some live up to the hype, most fall by the wayside and fizzle out. I believe Low Code has the potential to stay the course and truly transform the way enterprise applications are built and consumed, especially in healthcare – let’s understand why.

At the outset, I believe it is important to first assess the maturity of a technology before we can truly analyze its potential impact on business. I fundamentally rely on two parameters for assessing maturity –

1. Adoption by prospects & customers
2. Adoption by big tech firms

Post covid, I have personally seen more than 50% of new initiatives evaluating the use of a low code alternative while more than 33% approved the use of low-code technology indicating a seriousness of intent. In addition, Big Tech has also shown a great appetite for low code – Gartner’s 2021 magic quadrant for enterprise low code application platforms puts Microsoft in the leader’s quadrant and Oracle figures in the challengers. So, it goes without saying that low code technology is here to stay and can have a significant impact in the healthcare world.

Low code is not new to the world – in fact, I was a great fan of low code more than 25 years ago! When I was moving out of writing code in Fox Pro, Clipper, Delphi and Cobol, I bumped into newer platforms like Oracle Forms, Visual Basic and Power Builder which were quite popular. We could technically build applications with almost zero lines of code using these platforms. It paved the way for rapid application development, and we built large business applications using these technologies. So, low code technologies existed about 3 decades back but as technology advanced, and we moved towards stateless protocols graduating from client server technologies and started building apps on mobile, these platforms could not keep pace and eventually faded away.

Why is low-code popular in the healthcare world? In the last 15 months, due to Covid 19, healthcare organizations brought much of their new IT development to a grinding halt and they had to reprioritize their focus on care delivery. Post covid, there are new pressing needs like telehealth, remote patient monitoring, equitable access to care or care equity and predictive disease control. Also, CMS has been working on building guidelines around the concept of hospital beyond walls and promoting hospitals to think of new ways of achieving this.

The traditional focus of the industry is now shifting rapidly from point of care to point of need. Let’s look at some of the health-tech industry’s pre-COVID priorities that are yet to be accomplished. For example, patient involvement in building care teams, seamless interoperability, data democratization, secure ecosystems and many more. Now, the healthcare industry has to address a backlog of pre-covid initiatives while working on newer models of care which have become a pressing need of today.

According to me the limiting factor isn’t the budgets available but the aggressive timelines within which these priorities need to be addressed. Hence, the healthcare and life sciences industries have been scouting for innovative ways to accelerate timelines and place more control in the hands of business users to develop applications in a simple, elegant, and efficient manner. Quite clearly, embracing low code is the answer to many of these challenges.

In addition, as LCAP companies begin to mature they have increasingly started focusing on providing industry focused offerings, which wasn’t the case till recently. LCAP companies now offer healthcare universal data models, FHIL layers and marketplace plug-and-play components which can really accelerate your development process.

As a result, there has been substantial interest and I’ve seen life sciences companies quickly picking up LCAP with significant re-engineering efforts underway. Tech companies building population health solutions and provider organizations for member outreach are also taking leading positions. Finally, there are a few companies that are seriously considering building their specialty EMRs from scratch using a low-code technology platform. It certainly is a bold decision to explore building an enterprise grade application using low-code platforms and underscores the potential seen by enterprises.

I recommend that any legacy modernization project must have a phase to quickly evaluate if an LCAP platform could be an alternate option. If you are rearchitecting your digital front door or your digital workplace, then an LCAP strategy would make a world of difference. You must also know that there are innumerable LCAP platforms for you to choose from with each having their own strengths and drawbacks. Choosing the right platform can prove to be a very important decision and it would be wise for one to account for maintenance, ease of building superior UI/UX, the availability of pre-built components and most importantly the total cost of ownership.

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