The Roadmap to Building a Custom Healthcare Mobile App

Technology has brought dramatic transformation to the healthcare sector. Medical and health applications have opened new avenues of progress within healthcare, which is making substantial strides forward! Healthcare applications have proven incredibly useful for both patients and healthcare providers alike. Doctors find relief in these apps, connecting them with those seeking healthcare assistance. Healthcare providers can use devices like healthcare apps to understand patients' symptoms better and digitally describe their condition (if necessary). Healthcare apps enable faster and more accurate diagnoses than ever before. Since the COVID-19 pandemic erupted around the globe, healthcare apps have experienced an exponential surge in their use and acceptance by patients, doctors, and healthcare app development services providers worldwide. Even as conditions improve and everyday life returns for most, people continue to utilize healthcare apps at an increasing rate, perhaps reflecting their convenience. Digitizing healthcare has made healthcare more accessible and affordable for the general population, especially in underprivileged parts of the world. The pandemic has created an urgent and apparent demand for medical technology, spurring market expansion to meet that need. Healthcare apps provide seamless and direct communication channels between physicians and patients, facilitating efficient care delivery.

Use Cases of a Healthcare App

It's best to identify an application type that matches your specific needs and purposes to create relevant and in-demand products. To develop the most successful healthcare apps possible, keeping an eye out for industry trends and then applying them can be invaluable - here you'll find some of them:

Telehealth & Telemedicine

Telehealth and telemedicine software solutions between doctors and patients have become increasingly popular, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying social isolation. These technologies enable medical specialists to deliver remote medical services, communicate online, and receive efficient healthcare more rapidly.

Electronic Health Record (EHR/EMR)

EHR/EMR solutions enable healthcare organizations to securely store, update, and collect all medical information related to a patient on one platform - saving both time and manual errors while facilitating data sharing between various institutions.

Health Informational Exchange (HIE)

Tracking vital signs such as body temperature, blood pressure, and heart rate is essential to accurate diagnosis and maintaining patients' well-being and quality of life. With HIE, we aim to facilitate such tracking for maximum benefit to patients and practitioners alike. Health information exchange solution allows physicians to measure vital parameters quickly and effortlessly with only smartphone authentication, quickly transmitting the data for doctors to monitor and analyze vital signs. Built-in diagnostic systems also simplify this process.

Built-in diagnostic systems

The system enables the collection and processing of data from embedded and IoT devices that integrate with EHR platforms by visualizing, analyzing, diagnosing, and treating remote patients quickly and easily. E-prescribing (eRx) services are also available.

E-prescribing (ex)

E-prescribing systems offer a convenient and accurate method of creating, storing, and sending prescriptions using medical information systems in an electronic health ecosystem. E-prescribing can reduce check-out errors and save doctors and their patient’s time.

RCM & Medical Billing

The RCM (Reliability-centered maintenance) solution includes a medical billing system that covers EHR (Electronic Health Record) and PM (Practice Management) services. Your apps should work seamlessly together without the need to sign in separately for each one, providing access to patient records and bill payments anywhere, not only at work. This solution frees users from investing in costly hardware or worrying about IT infrastructure, data encryption, or compliance requirements.

Types of Healthcare Apps

Healthcare apps can be divided into two main groups: those targeting professionals such as doctors, nurses, and service personnel and those designed for regular users like patients and ordinary consumers. Each type has its subcategories that we will detail here so you know all you need to before beginning to develop your app.

Applications for Professionals

This category of apps is tailored specifically for healthcare providers such as doctors and nurses. As such, their features may be incomprehensible and unnecessary for a general audience user.

• Medical Networking

Although popular social networks such as Facebook and Twitter exist, they may not provide an ideal environment for the communication needs of medical staff. That is why there are specific social networks intended solely for doctors.

• Billing Apps

Patient billing can be an incomprehensible experience, so hospitals require dedicated tools for this process. Billing apps help simplify this experience while improving processes like claims management, accounting, payment processing, and patient registration at healthcare facilities - plus more!

• Telehealth

Telehealth apps offer an efficient and seamless way of seeing patients quickly without leaving your office. Receptions take place through video applications, making receptions much faster. Their popularity stems from being able to cut the no-show rate by 50%.

• Medical prescription apps

This app dramatically streamlines patients' selection and purchase process, reducing side effects and risks. Doctors can easily customize a list of drugs and dosages, add new medicines to the existing list as needed, and make delivery in any form convenient for the patient.

Apps for Patients

From their names alone, it is evident that these apps were specifically created to help patients manage their health and interact with physicians more efficiently.

• Mental Health apps 

These applications aim to enhance the mood and psychological state of users. Prerecorded meditations, breathing exercises, gamification elements, and more may provide relief from depression, stress, anxiety, and sleep disturbances, as well as other symptoms of worsening mental state.

• Health Monitoring

This category encompasses various applications designed to track a user's health. These could include quick reference books about diseases, medications, symptoms, and other applications that help monitor users.

• Medical Education

At their core, these applications serve as vast encyclopedias for medical students, doctors, and ordinary users who want more knowledge about healthcare and all its components.

• Medication Trackers

These applications are relatively simple and very popular; they allow us to administer medications accurately with pinpoint precision. They serve as replacements for calendars and alarm clocks while tracking our intake. These apps go beyond simple scheduling and reminders by keeping track of medications at local pharmacies, informing users where the most affordable offers can be found.

• Dieting Apps

Diet apps are applications designed to assist individuals in creating and sticking to various diets. Their primary functions include a calorie calculator, meal planning reminders, food and health databases, and various databases of nutrition-related information.

Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Custom Healthcare Mobile App

Trying to develop a custom healthcare mobile app without first knowing its goals, features, and functions in depth can be daunting. Before beginning the development of any healthcare app, one should determine its type, target audience, and problems it addresses, as well as possible ways of solving them. This section will walk through each phase of developing a custom healthcare mobile app.

Establish the Issue

An essential step in custom healthcare mobile app development, understanding end-user demands is critical. Discover any problems they encounter with their current solution and identify areas for improvement with your application. Clearly define user personas to capture how your solution would fulfill the medical needs of users or whether there already exist options that they would consider instead. Consider choosing one or more healthcare sectors when developing an app - perhaps for diabetes or anxiety tracking.

Determine the Platforms and Technologies Involved

A key aspect of healthcare development is selecting an assistant device. Hence, your app is always at hand, requiring only voice-command access. Remember that senior patients tend to visit websites, whereas younger ones prefer apps or speech devices. Your market study will assist in deciding where and how you place your app. At its core, interoperability must be ensured for healthcare applications to thrive and operate optimally.

Decide what type of app you'd like to develop

Before creating a healthcare app, it's wise to research its mobile scene and how your product might fit within it. We can divide existing healthcare apps into several categories.

• Clinical Assistance Apps: These apps are tailored for medical professionals and include features like reviewing laboratory results and patient charts, symptom checkers, digital imaging capabilities, and other forms of assistance that enable accurate diagnoses in hospitals or offices. Practitioners use them in their practice.
• Reminder Apps: This mobile application enables healthcare providers and physicians to book appointments for patients while reminding them about upcoming ones. Furthermore, such apps provide electronic prescription pickup services.
• Remote monitoring apps and telemedicine allow healthcare providers to transmit patient data from various locations remotely. At the same time, doctors can remotely monitor patients by accessing data such as remote oxygen checks or ECG viewing.
• *Medical Training and Education Apps: These applications offer doctors access to educational material for more specialized knowledge. Apps range from educational games and study guides to clinical reference information and drug-related facts.
• Health and Lifestyle Apps: This category of apps typically appears on consumer markets and helps users monitor their personal health through diet and fitness tracking apps and motivational or meditation mobile applications.

Choose your app features

After you understand your app's vision, intended users, and intended use case, the next step should be selecting its features. Technical assistance apps require a dashboard for visualizing various data in one place. In contrast, lifestyle apps may not need such an essential function. Popular features found in healthcare apps typically include:

• Analytics, Reporting, and Charting: If your app deals with data, equip it with an analytics engine capable of producing visual reports and charts so users can easily track their activity or review their progress.
• Dashboards: Dashboards can be invaluable tools not only for patients but also for medical professionals. Gathering all essential data in one convenient place allows providers to become more efficient while helping their patients gain greater insight into their health.
• Payment Portal: To enable users to make payments using your app, a payment portal will be essential. For instance, some healthcare apps allow customers to purchase products or subscription packages.
• *Geolocation: Healthcare apps feature geolocation features to quickly help users locate doctors, clinics, medical facilities, or pharmacies they need quickly.
• Real-time chat and video: These features are especially prominent in telemedicine apps that enable patients to connect with doctors to discuss their health and treatment options and receive electronic prescriptions.
• Patient Portal: This feature allows patients to stay up-to-date with healthcare provider alerts, reminders, messages, and e-prescriptions by accessing a patient portal.

Pay Attention to User Interface and Experience

In developing mobile healthcare applications, user interface/experience design is paramount. Elderly individuals favor easy navigation with more giant letters; on the other hand, younger people usually seek colorful user interfaces with enhanced capabilities and functionalities. Design considerations also depend upon whether your target audience comprises healthcare professionals, patients, or the general public. Beyond visual considerations, it's also vital to consider how the app will appear across various-sized devices based on which platform is chosen for implementation.

Choose Your Location of App Launch

When releasing a new app, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and IT advocates usually create it to meet the needs of their native countrymen and women. Suppose you intend on going global with your launch of an app. In that case, board members need to know country-specific challenges, such as user personas and legislation regarding the development/deployment of medical apps in that region. Cultivate and Validate MVP

Concentrate on creating and validating the MVP

Creating an MVP instead of developing an application can ensure it has been thoroughly tested before being put on the market.

Find an App Development Company

Hiring a reliable healthcare app developer will ensure your health app has all the most up-to-date features and functionalities. Healthcare mobile app development agencies employ teams of UI/UX designers, skilled app developers, engineers, project managers, and marketing specialists. Each employee's comments and ideas are regularly considered; healthcare app developers provide access to cutting-edge technology and industrial expertise.

Testing Your App

Testing is one of the cornerstones of healthcare solutions development. Testing should encompass everything, from user experience and interface design to content development. Effective testing can reduce development time and expenses while helping uncover errors more quickly and building up your reputation as a provider of services.

Launch and Assess Performance

After concluding your application testing process, it's time to connect with users. After you've released your app, monitoring its performance using any in-app analytics tools installed during its creation is crucial. Users' needs and questions must also be taken seriously, with regular updates to maintain user interest. Although this is typically used when developing healthcare apps, your application could stand out by including unique features that set it apart.

How Much Does Custom Healthcare Mobile App Development Cost?

The cost of developing a custom healthcare mobile app depends on various factors, including its features, platforms, tests, UI/UX design, development team, compliance, and maintenance needs.

App Features

Features and functionalities have an impactful influence on the final cost of healthcare app development. As more features are added to a health app, its creation cost increases. Therefore, for an exceptional customer experience at an economical price, it is wiser to prioritize only essential functions during its first version development process.

App Platforms

Your choice between iOS, Android, and cross-platform development will dramatically impact costs. Native apps (built explicitly for each OS) are more costly because you design two distinct applications from scratch. At the same time, solutions like Flutter or React Native may save money while offering comparable performance or user experiences.

Design of User Experience

Crafting an attractive yet functional UI/UX app design may require additional expenses, as users expect more from you than just regular text-based updates. An excellent mobile app design will encourage users to continue downloading and using your app rather than abandon it over time.

Regulation Compliance

Healthcare apps must adhere to stringent regulations. When developing one, one must understand all business regulations pertaining to it and their application. For instance, HIPAA and GDPR are essential laws governing how health information is managed in the US and EU.

Maintenance

After its launch, your mobile app will need continued maintenance regarding updates, bug fixes, and additional features that could increase its total lifetime cost. After considering all the factors affecting the development time and cost, below is an estimate of features and their costs in Southeast Asia - one of the more cost-effective outsourcing locations, at $20-50/hour.

Conclusion

Healthcare app development presents an incredible opportunity to revolutionize medical services. However, it is vital to partner with an experienced tech team to unlock its full potential. A reliable partner will easily navigate complex healthcare regulations while upholding stringent security and privacy measures while taking your project from inception through completion. The development of custom healthcare mobile app can be a complicated process. Juggling high budgets, HIPAA compliance requirements, data security needs, and choosing an ideal tech stack can be time-consuming and overwhelming for your team. JPLoft can assist with developing secure medical apps by helping identify market potential, selecting suitable technologies, and providing experienced specialists who will produce high-performance applications that exceed customer expectations.

 FAQS

1. How can I increase engagement in a medical app? 

You can employ a few strategies to increase user engagement with your platform, including sending reminders for appointments, prescription refills, tests, and healthcare advice, as well as offering educational material and healthcare tips. Furthermore, adding some gamification elements that keep users engaged could also prove effective.

2. What apps do doctors use?

Physicians can use medical networking apps like Doximity to stay in contact with peers and receive updates about research and medical developments, as well as telemedicine platforms like Teladoc for patient outreach. In addition, educational apps like Epocrates can provide invaluable knowledge on drugs, diseases, and diagnostics.

3. Are You Thinking About Starting a Medical App?

According to Research2Guidance's data, 56% of companies develop medical apps within one year, while 84% launch one within two. Building an MVP typically takes three to six months and serves as the blueprint for future iterations of your product; creating a basic prototype usually only takes 2 to 4 weeks and gives an idea of the product in development.

4. What are some key business models for healthcare apps?

Medical apps typically monetize their product through in-app ads and subscription fees. You could also offer relevant in-app purchases or sell anonymized patient data to gain further insights and research opportunities.