Digital tools for doctors: medical calculators

With about 70% of clinicians being tech and digital savvy, their online presence opens up great opportunities for your pharma business [1]. However, as their interest in using devices within their daily practice grows, so does their demand for the quality of services provided by digital health businesses.

How to draw targeted clinicians to your site packed with valuable content and toolkits? There are plenty of options, from email marketing to SEO practices. However, there is another, less frequently used, albeit by no means less effective way — to give them a simple tool that will facilitate their medical practice. Medical calculators are one such tool.

What are the benefits of medical calculators, and how to embed a calculator on your site?

Medical studies, evidence-based data, one's own research and experience, and intuition all together guide physicians in their day-to-day clinical practice. Today, the arsenal of HCPs is complemented by mobile applications, providing extensive access to a range of "perks". So much so that modern-day healthcare is hard to imagine without human-technology collaboration.

Medical calculators give HCPs insights into how to estimate health conditions by providing various clinical scores and indices. The main focus of these tools is to assist clinicians in making rapid, data-driven decisions.

For example, using BMI calculators to determine body mass index can provide physicians with a view of a patient’s health status and prescribe the right dose of medication based on particular metrics.

There are hundreds of them. However, according to the Informatics Institute [3], they all can be divided into the following main groups:

For example, the Duke Criteria for Infective Endocarditis identification can indicate a definite, probable, or rejected diagnosis of infective endocarditis.

For example, a calculator designed to assess the major bleeding risk on the HEMORR2HAGES Score may recommend a specific course of action based on the findings.

The calculator provides the probability of a patient having or progressing to a particular condition. For example, the APACHE II Score allows you to determine the probability of mortality.

The calculator places a patient into one or more categories. For example, the Apgar Score calculator helps you quickly assess a newborn's condition and with subsequent grading.

Medical calculators are a practical solution for everyday medical tasks that your audience may perform. With many formulas based on EBM and the most up-to-date med-focused guidelines, medical calculators can help HCPs make informed decisions.

Digitally-savvy doctors, paramedics, nurses, medical students, or even those not med-involved may find the tool helpful in their daily routines.

The flexible and easy-to-access format means more healthcare practitioners with mobiles will be able to use it to improve outcomes. Similarly, medical calculators can be useful tools for tracking re-treatment plans and payments or evaluating the performance of a medical facility. Moreover, although calculators are generally designed for doctors, patients, and health-conscious individuals can also use them to track and estimate their health conditions.

Firstly, in terms of cost, a crucial factor here is the cross-platform nature of such calculators: they can run on both web and mobile devices, which already reduces the price in half.

Secondly, adapting them to your own needs will not significantly affect your budget, as modifying the design and code involves making changes in one place rather than changing each calculator individually.

As for usability, the doctor only needs to enter the patient's data into the calculator, and the tool will do the rest.

The system is designed in such a way that it easily handles 95% of all cases that occur in calculators, with the remaining 5% customizable manually. In this way, the ready-made core can be easily extended with additional features afterward.

In the past, the issue of the testability of each calculator was an additional burden. Let's say that each calculator was a separate program that had to be tested separately. And if their number reached several hundred, it was even more costly in terms of time and money spent.

However, now we have one program where every calculator is data. There is also the possibility for more automation, including complete separation of the calculator interface from the calculator as a model of computation. This makes testing cheaper and easier while allowing you to take care of the tool's accuracy.

Current healthcare calculators have a number of additional advantages:

Developing a calculator once and deploying it both on the web and mobile has a positive impact on your time and budget. 

The operation of the calculator is separate from the presentation layer. This gives you the freedom to customize your preferred calculator. For example, if you want to make visual changes and customize the design to match your brand image, you can do it in no time: simply customize it in one click, and the changes will appear on all calculators.

You can easily expand the functionality of the calculator by introducing new elements according to the needs of your pharma business.

Although calculators can be easily customized to meet the needs of your audience, this is an all-in-one product with basic features already in place.

Here is a list of over 130 different, fully customizable medical calculators available on Brandmed webiste. When you choose a tool of your preference, it's ready to insert into your site.

We can create a calculator design that meets your needs. If you don't find the calculator you want in the list, you are free to describe it, and we will try to add it. 

Anyway…

As a well-staffed team with medical experts at the helm, Brandmed can help your website become a source of unique insights and tools for your med-oriented audience. We have been analyzing, planning, visualizing, engineering, implementing, and supporting pharma companies on the road to complete digital transformation for about 8 years now.

Contact us, and we'll discuss a plan to take your pharma business off the ground together.

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