Healthcare
Healthcare software for patient access, clinical admin and care data
We build patient apps, clinician portals, HL7 FHIR integrations, healthcare analytics and AI-assisted admin for clinics, hospital groups and digital health companies, connected to the record and booking systems you already run.
Overview
Technology for healthcare providers
Healthcare runs on a patchwork of clinical records, booking tools, lab systems, billing, spreadsheets, phone lines and paper forms. Patients repeat the same details at every step. Clinicians re-key information between screens. Managers wait for reports that are already out of date when they arrive. Each gap costs time that should go to patients.
Softweb Planet builds the software that closes those gaps: patient apps and portals, provider tools, telehealth journeys, integration services for existing clinical systems, data pipelines for analytics, and AI-assisted workflows that take on administrative load while qualified staff keep every clinical decision. Our DevOps and cloud engineers design the hosting, access control and audit logging alongside the application, not after it.
The same approach suits a single clinic replacing phone-only booking, a hospital group connecting several sites, a diagnostic provider automating reports, or a digital health company building a new product for patients in the UK, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or beyond. Clinical leads and information governance staff can join the review of working software every one to two weeks, so safety and privacy questions are raised while a screen or data flow is still cheap to change.
Challenges
What healthcare providers are up against
Patient information split across systems
The record system, lab results, booking tool and billing each hold a fragment of the patient. Staff phone colleagues or open four screens to answer a simple question.
Insurance approvals that hold up treatment
Pre-authorisation requests, claim forms and insurer queries are completed by hand from the record, and a missing procedure code or attachment sends a claim back days later.
Access that still depends on the phone
Booking, rescheduling and results queries arrive by phone, lines are busy at opening time, and missed appointments go unfilled because nobody had time to call the waiting list.
Closed or ageing clinical systems
Many record and practice management systems offer limited APIs, older HL7 v2 feeds or nightly file exports, and vendors may charge for every new interface.
Health data that needs a reason for every access
Health data is special category data under UK GDPR. Every access must be justified, logged and minimised, and partners send long security questionnaires before they connect.
Waiting-time and capacity figures compiled by hand
Clinic utilisation, waiting times, no-shows and referral turnaround are pulled together monthly from exports, so a growing backlog is spotted weeks after it started.
What we build
Technology solutions for this sector
Patient booking and communication apps
Mobile and web apps for booking, rescheduling, reminders, pre-visit forms, secure messaging and clinician-released results, built in Flutter or React Native with accessibility designed in from the first screen.
Provider and clinician portals
Role-based workspaces for referral inboxes, worklists, clinic schedules and patient summaries, with approvals and an audit trail recording who viewed or changed what, and when.
Telehealth consultation journeys
Booking, identity checks, pre-consultation questionnaires, a virtual waiting room and video calls through an established real-time video provider, with notes and follow-up tasks written back to the record.
HL7 FHIR and HL7 v2 integration service
A service that maps codes and fields between record, lab and booking systems, validates every message, queues and retries failures and keeps a replayable log, proven on read-only feeds before it may write to a clinical record.
Capacity and waiting-list analytics
Pipelines that bring booking, activity, billing and referral data into a warehouse under pseudonymised identifiers, feeding daily dashboards on clinic utilisation, waiting times, no-shows and referral turnaround.
AI-assisted insurance and claims paperwork
Language models that pull patient, policy and procedure details from pre-authorisation requests, claim forms and insurer replies, check them against your price list and required attachments, and queue each one for staff to approve before submission.
Region-specific cloud hosting
AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud environments defined in infrastructure as code, with private networking, encryption under managed keys, least-privilege access, central audit logs and backups kept in the region you choose.
Our role is engineering. We design architectures to support regulated healthcare environments, including encryption, role-based access, audit logging, data minimisation and hosting in the region you choose, and we can work within your compliance requirements. We do not provide clinical, legal or regulatory advice, and nothing on this page is a claim of certification or compliance status. Clinical safety, information governance sign-off and regulatory decisions stay with your organisation and its advisers. AI features prepare information for qualified staff and do not make clinical decisions, and any feature that could count as a medical device is flagged in discovery for your regulatory advisers to assess before it is built.
Typical projects
Where we usually start
- 01A patient app for a multi-site clinic group covering booking, reminders, pre-visit forms and secure messaging, connected to the existing practice management system.
- 02A pre-authorisation assistant for a private hospital that reads insurer forms, fills the request from the patient record and holds it for a staff member to check and submit.
- 03A telehealth service with online booking, video consultations and consultation notes written back to the patient record through a FHIR interface.
- 04An analytics warehouse that combines booking, billing and activity data into daily dashboards on capacity, no-shows and waiting times without exposing patient names.
- 05Moving a diagnostic provider's on-premises reporting system into a region-specific cloud environment managed entirely through infrastructure as code.
Services and solutions
How we help healthcare providers
Healthcare FAQ
Frequently asked questions
No. Software alone cannot make an organisation compliant, and we do not claim compliance or certification for anything we build. Compliance also depends on your policies, contracts, training and governance. What we provide is architecture designed to support regulated healthcare environments: encryption, role-based access, audit logging, data minimisation and hosting in the region you choose. We work within the requirements your information governance team and advisers set, whether they come from UK GDPR, HIPAA for a US-facing product or Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law.
We use the most controlled interface the system supports, in this order: a documented API such as HL7 FHIR, HL7 v2 messages through an integration engine, a vendor-approved database view, then scheduled file exports. We ask the vendor for a test environment early, because interface access is often the longest lead time in a healthcare project. Every message passes through our integration service, which maps codes between systems, validates required fields and keeps a replayable log, so a rejected message is visible and can be corrected and resent rather than silently lost.
HL7 v2 is the older, message-based standard that most hospital and lab systems still use to announce events such as an admission or a new result, while FHIR is a newer standard that exposes records as web APIs a modern app can query directly. In practice the two are often combined: FHIR where the record system offers it, and HL7 v2 feeds for systems that only send messages. Which one we use depends on what your vendors support, and we confirm that in discovery before committing to a design.
Yes, we build the full journey around the consultation: booking and payment, identity checks, pre-consultation questionnaires, a waiting room, the video call, clinician notes and follow-up tasks. For the video itself we integrate an established real-time video provider rather than running our own media servers, which keeps call quality and media security with a specialist. Notes and outcomes are written back to your clinical system through the integration service, so each consultation joins the patient record instead of sitting in a separate silo.
We design for the least confident user first. That means large tap targets, plain language, adjustable text size, screen-reader support and journeys that ask one question per screen. We design against WCAG accessibility guidelines, support right-to-left layouts where patients read Urdu or Arabic alongside English, and keep a phone or reception fallback for every critical task. Where your organisation can arrange it, prototypes are tested with patients, and with carers who book on someone else's behalf, before development starts.
Software reduces missed appointments by making it easier for patients to confirm, cancel or rebook than to simply not turn up. Reminders go out by SMS, WhatsApp or app notification at intervals you choose, each with one-tap confirm and cancel links. A cancelled slot can be offered automatically to patients on a waiting list, and a dashboard shows no-shows by service, day and reminder channel so you can see which changes help. We do not promise a particular reduction, because results depend on your patients and services.
Yes. Our pipelines separate identifiers from clinical and operational data as early as possible and replace them with pseudonymous keys before records reach the analytics warehouse. Dashboards on capacity, waiting times, no-shows or referral turnaround rarely need names or contact details, so most analysts never see them. Where re-identification is genuinely needed, for example to contact a patient, it happens through a controlled, logged service with restricted access. Aggregated views can also suppress very small counts that might identify someone.
Yes, where a suitable cloud region or an approved local data centre exists in that country. Region availability differs between AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and changes over time, so we confirm the current options for your provider during discovery rather than assuming. Where no suitable region exists, we set out the alternatives, such as local hosting or a nearby region, and your legal advisers decide which is acceptable. Backups and logs are kept in the same jurisdiction as the primary data.
Healthcare software costs depend on scope, and we give a fixed quote once a short discovery phase has mapped it. The main drivers are the number of user groups, how many clinical or administrative systems need integrating and whether their vendors provide test environments, whether AI features are involved, accessibility and language requirements, and the security documentation your governance team expects. A focused first release, such as online booking with reminders connected to one system, is far smaller than a multi-site platform, so we recommend starting there and expanding in phases.
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