Our business idea has been to develop a holistic health-service related smartphone application as we have identified the growing market potential of using mobile technology to digitalise healthcare services. The application we have designed, eMed, will provides two main functions: emergency call and notifications, and medication monitoring and reminder. The aim of eMed is to simplify and speed up access to health and emergency services in the event of an emergency, and also to facilitate patient empowerment for self-care by allowing patients to monitor and mange their own health conditions more effectively remotely so that unnecessary pressure on healthcare providers can be reduced. eMed and it’s functions were derived from analysis of online secondary research on the UK Department of Health and the NHS websites, which identified the general trends in our target market. Primary market research was also conducted in order to better understand our potential customers needs, and also what our competitors were currently offering in existing healthcare related smartphone applications.
We have identified healthcare, socialcare, and emergency services providing institutions, such as the NHS, Department of Health, and the UK ambulance services as eMed stakeholders, and as indirect clients who may be affected by and can be beneficiaries of our application. For example, the UK Department of Health has indicated it is considering encouraging GPs to prescribe useful health-related apps (those that complement NHS services or their health-related objectives) to suitable patients. Activities like these can increase eMed’s download rate by acting as an indicator of the application’s credibility and high service quality, and therefore requirements of indirect
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