COVID-19 has made us all aware of a lot of things, taking care of our health at the right time is one of them. As we know that the digitization has enabled every industry to provide services to audiences out of their capability including the healthcare industry. We have seen the example during the pandemic and since when businesses have been convinced in every way that they need a digital solution to run their ventures effectively.
Coming to the healthcare app development services, it has become essential for hospitals, clinics, medical stores, and even, entire medical sector to go digital while providing the best amenities to the patients. If this sector makes you invest in healthcare mobile app development, then for it. You can read the below guide to get knowledge about the costs and features involved in healthcare app development. Keep reading-
Table of Contents
A Quick Overview of Healthcare Mobile App
A healthcare app is called a software program proposed to deliver doctors, patients, and general clients with health-relevant details, assets, and solutions in the healthcare segment. Many of these applications integrate online prescription tools, allowing patients to easily request, manage, and refill prescriptions while ensuring secure communication with their healthcare providers. These healthcare apps are used for informing healthcare professionals and patients regarding their health care measures, health track progress, treatment support, assistant in clinical trials, and consent management. The motive behind designing the healthcare app is to make sure provide a healthy lifestyle to people comprising full-time medical care.
A healthcare app is like a collection data center, in which wearables and electronic devices find their data required for monitoring purposes. These apps can analyze and evaluate physiology and biochemistry to improve the health of registered patients.
How Does Healthcare App Help People?
By using healthcare apps, one can easily find a doctor or healthcare professional near their locality, book an appointment, and see all the medical reports and tests by sitting at their homes. Amidst the global pandemic, people were able to get their health updates and see their appointed doctors or nutritionists through video calls to talk about health issues. Many people also use health lifestyle apps to be active and health monitoring apps to keep on checking themselves frequently. It was all possible because of the medical app development services.
To use these apps, people just need to register themselves on the app by entering their name, email, contact number, and health-related details including their blood group, current health status, blood pressure, heart rates, etc. After that, they can log in to the app via the registered email and password. These apps also enable doctors to collect personal health data efficiently. Patients directly submit their information and insurance cards to the healthcare mobile apps and then, healthcare professionals and doctors consider that data to treat you and do the paperwork.
Diverse Types of Healthcare Apps
Businesses have multiple options to go for when it is about mobile healthcare app development. Before getting to know about how to create a healthcare app, they must evaluate the most popular healthcare app type that can align with their goal and provide them high revenue. Get to know about the different kinds of healthcare apps for healthcare professionals and patients below-
For Healthcare Professionals
Healthcare apps designed for medical and healthcare professionals are planned to assist doctors, physicians, nurses, and other medical staff while providing healthcare facilities to patients. Have a look at some of them below-
Medical Record Apps
Medical record apps are used to improve disease treatment plans and promote document processing for some of the particular healthcare organizations. Healthcare apps like RXNT, Meditab, DrChrono Practice Management, etc. are popular examples of these kinds of apps. These assist healthcare professionals to collect data about patients’ illnesses and work as an electronic copy to get the information. Small-level clinics use it to keep the data about regular patients.
Clinical & Diagnostic App
Medical apps like Human DX, OSP Labs, etc. strengthen physicians to support the patients for collecting, analyzing, and exchanging information. Businesses who want to have mhealth app development services can go for these advanced diagnostic mHealth apps that generate lab results, visual photographs (x-ray, MRI), e-chart analysis, symptom control, etc.
Medical Database Software
Visual DX, Epocrates, and MDCalc are some of the best-known medical Database software. These help to maintain the medical history and care plans of patients same as the EHR (electronic health record) software. The database will be categorized by the illness, not by the patient’s profiles like EMR software.
Medical Billing Apps
These apps simplify the entire billing and invoicing process in the medical sector. They digitalize and manage the accounting divisions of hospitals, clinics, etc., to maintain a track of patient data, including payment processing, claim management, patient registration, and more. Optometry Medical Billing is one specialized area within this field. Some examples of medical billing apps are kareo medical billing, Waystar, Advanced MD, EpicCare EMR and CureMD EMR.
Telehealth
Apps like Teladoc, GoodRx Care, etc. let the physicians book the appointment with their patients. They can also provide consultation to them via video calls and messages. These apps are appropriate for both medical professionals and patients as it provides patients the comfort of the home while receiving the medical consultation.
For Patients
Businesses don’t only choose mobile medical app developers to develop apps for healthcare professionals, some apps work to make patients’ lives convenient. Following are these-
Appointment Scheduling App
Apps like SimplyBook.Me help people to book an appointment with a doctor in a specific area as it improves patient satisfaction. For this, there is needed to add a physician’s profile, calendar to add or change the schedule dates, and payment services. The notification feature can also be added to this kind of app to remind users about their planned appointment.
Fitness App
When it comes to attain health and fitness app development services, apps like BetterMe, MyFitnessPal, Digifit, etc, are some of the popular apps to look at. These are intended to assist a broad range of people with every age group. Today’s youth want to do workouts or to get fit at their convenience, hence these apps are suitable for them. These apps provide collaboration with the virtual trainer, watching their diet, health, and activities to adopt healthy habits.
Personal Health Recording
These apps permit patients to have easy access to their medical records without having permission from medical facilities. To develop this kind of app, you can have cross-platform app development services and can consider apps such as myPHR, HealthVault, and others. Through these apps, any medical professional can review the user’s history in crucial circumstances like any emergency or unconsciousness. To provide patients extra care, the addition of Artificial Intelligence will be helpful.
Healthy Lifestyle Apps
This category includes apps like Remente, Elevate, etc. along with multiple apps including brain training apps, fitness apps, and self-improvement apps. These are helpful to improve the mental health of the users.
Diet & Nutrition Apps
The apps comprising Fooducate, Lifesum, and others help the users to have a time-to-time and balanced diet and control their eating habits. There are some helpful features to add to these apps that are- reminders, meal planning, calories calculator, food & health database, and much more.
Market Study & Growth of Digital Healthcare Sector
The on-demand healthcare app development industry is active for so many years in the market and after the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been witnessed tremendous growth in the sector. As per the sources, the global digital health market was calculated to have a value of $175 billion in 2019. Then, between the years 2019 to 2025, it is expected to grow with an almost 25% CAGR. According to that, the global digital health market is forecasted to evolve at about $657 billion by 2025.
Despite it, the number of investors who are willing to invest in the digital health industry has been increased massively. In 2010, there was only invested $1 billion in the industry but in 2020, there were more than $21 billion.
In the below graph, you can see the representation of growth in the global digital health market size from 2019 to 2025-
Popular Examples of Medical & Healthcare Apps
Multiple apps are serving the medical and healthcare industry for years and have been recognized as the best ones when it is about providing medical facilities. Below are some of the popular medical & healthcare apps:
Important Features to be Included in a Healthcare Application
There are various other aspects despite choosing a healthcare app development company when it is about building a medical and healthcare app. Integration of suitable features can make your app shine out and be capable enough to grab the audience’s consideration. Here are some of the core and advanced features you must add to the healthcare app-
Basic Features
Let’s have a glance at some of the most common features depending on the app’s purpose that you might consider making your best among all-
Registration
Be it patients, doctors, or app admin, they must get registered with the app. There is a simple registration process attached to the app. Users can register by entering their details such as name, email, contact number, and password. After registration, they can log in to the app with just email and password.
Doctor & Patient Profiles
Doctor or patient, whoever logged in to the app must maintain their profile including the basic details such as profile picture, name, medical details, place of work, address, etc. With these profiles, there can be integrated ratings & review features. It will help others to know about the doctors they must prefer in terms of medical services.
Search Bar
It is complicated to find necessary information within a large database. To make it easy for users, there is involved the search bar to manage both structure and unstructured information base.
Book An Appointment
Top medical & healthcare apps like MyChart, Healow, Health4me, etc. have this most important feature. Using this, patients can book an appointment to visit their doctor or have a video consultation as per the availability of both parties.
Video Conferencing
The video conferencing feature is helpful for those who have shifted to some other country or due for any reason, they can’t visit their doctors. They can take the consultation and have real-time communication with the doctor via video or voice calls using HLS, WebRTC, or MediaStream protocols.
Speech Recognition
Comprising speech recognition will surely increase the mhealth app development cost, but it is significant to include having a transcript of a call to not let doctors skip any of the essential details. It enhances the effectiveness of overall medical processes and makes you able to focus on important aspects.
E-prescription
It permits doctors to send prescriptions online to specific patients. It is useful as it saves both time and cost while alleviating errors. If a user takes consultation from different healthcare professionals, it allows users to accumulate prescriptions from different sources.
Activity Feed
It involves all the necessary activities such as pills, rehab exercises, and hydration necessities. The app can generate the reports and recommendations based on the user’s activity feed that is gathered from the inputs or the wearables by the patient.
Health Dashboard
Doctors can have easy decisions after being sure about the information they have collected. All the data will be displayed at a user-friendly mHealth dashboard that can be seen by patients so that they can see how fast they are recovering.
Custom Notifications
Sometimes, patients forget to take medication on time that directly affects their health. It will be good if there will be such a feature that can notify or remind them about taking pills, or meeting reminders with the doctor.
Payment Processing
An experienced mobile app development company surely knows the importance of adding this feature. Most of the apps go for credit cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and many more to facilitate users with the most convenient payment gateway. Developers also comprise technologies such as Braintree or Stripe to handle online payments efficiently.
Advanced Features
After having the set of basic features, don’t you want to make your app slightly different from others? Hire mobile app developers from a reliable healthcare app development firm who can provide you with these following advanced features while giving it a competitive advantage-
Listing Functionality
Integrating this feature will provide all the lists such as medical events, medicines, doctors, and others to users. For this, developers can take the help of APIs like The List API.
Offline Access
It is not necessary, that all the users have a stable connection or fast-working internet, so in that case, they can also use the app while accessing it offline. There can be used ProWorkflow API for this.
Progress Tracking & Sharing
Be it healthcare, fitness, or lifestyle apps, this feature is a must added. The app users share their progress and achievements with their friends as they like them. They can do it via linked accounts of their social media within the app.
Health Records & Calculation
While having hospital app development services, it becomes essential to have this feature. It helps all the personal and health-relevant details of patients so that these can be used at the time of emergency. APIs like Human Medical API can be used for this.
Symptom Checking
It is a kind of list to keep the follow-up of patients, these include yes, no, and I don’t know options to select by the users. Based on the user’s answers to the questions, the app will find out the symptoms. Hence, users must give elaborated and precise answers.
In-app Messaging
Apps like MyChart, GoodRx, Teladoc, etc. comprise this feature so that users can communicate with the app authorities while facing any inconvenience. This functionality must be protected with the regional medical data protection legislation.
Wearable Connection
Wearables are essential sources to collect health data with the help of APIs like Google Cloud Healthcare API, GETHealth API, and Apple HealthKit API. These wearables available for both iOS and Android platforms help to track sleep hours, weight, heartbeat, diet, and many more.
Cloud Integration
Through this feature, doctors and patients will be facilitated to fetch the data from anywhere as the entire data will be stored in the cloud. It permits access to the required information without losing record track.
Analytics, CRM, & Reporting
Be it patient or doctor on-demand app development services, it is the most useful feature. It will provide you with any kind of reports such as drug routes, prescription history, insurance reports, diagnosis history, lab results, and others along with real-time information of health parameters.
Monetization Model to Apply for a Healthcare App
To generate the desired level of revenue and profit from medical and healthcare apps is a time-consuming and tough process. The overall profit must be higher than the complete healthcare app development cost.
To make this happen, here is the monetization model to apply for a healthcare app, check this out-
1. Freemium Model
One of the most common ways to earn revenue that allow users to use the additional features of the app when they pay for them. Although all the features of the app are available for users, but some can be unlocked when users pay the amount.
2. In-app Ads
This monetization strategy is fast and easy to implement. The owner of the app can allow other businesses for relevant advertising on their medial app. They can have paid partnerships with the local vendors that want to promote their business. This promotion can be done via any of the ways such as native ads, banner ads, video ads, and full-screen ads. This strategy works upon the cost per click, cost per install, and cost per mile.
3. Paid App
This way is less used by businesses as it is not the most preferred way. Users are allowed to buy the app by paying some amount and it will be a one-time payment.
4. Subscription
Users can have access to some of the particular functions and features of the medical app by paying some amount and taking app subscriptions on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
How to Build a Healthcare App: Development Process
Want to know how to develop a healthcare app? To clear all your doubts, we have come up with this step-by-step guide to develop a healthcare app. Look at the following steps-
Step 1: Identifying the Business Needs
To find out the business needs and interests of your target audiences, you need to do a lot of market research. Whether you want to have healthcare, hospital, or medicine delivery app development services, there are a lot of questions to get answered if you want to make an efficient app. You must analyze your potential competitors, marketplace evaluation, conduct a SWOT analysis (strength, weakness, opportunities & threats), and get to know the interest of your target audiences. After assessing all these aspects, you will be able to create a powerful mHealth app to support the medical and healthcare sector.
Step 2: Documentation
After collecting all the required information from the market research and analysis, it is the right time to document the needed things to create the healthcare app. Now, you can determine what kind of app do you want as per your budget and needs, what is the development process you will follow, which healthcare app development company you will hire, what will be the cost to develop an app, etc. Decide the appropriate specifications and needs to build an app according to the functionalities, resources, cost, and personnel.
Step 3: Designing an MVP
Start designing and developing your app with an MVP. Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) comprising only required features will allow you to get responses from your target audiences. Through it, you can have idea validation, information about the required resources, and a fast time to market. In short, the MVP version of a healthcare mobile app works as a fully functioning solution serving the users with a primary purpose. Design the MVP with an attractive design to get the user’s attention including aspects like interactive UI/UX, screen rotation, Button placement, etc.
Step 4: App Development
Going further, you must consider an appropriate tech stack for this phase of the mobile app development process. Along with the coding part, you must consider all the required security compliances as per the different countries to launch the app worldwide. If your healthcare app will be suitable for the legislations such as HIPAA Act 1996, CCPA, HITECH Act, etc., it refers that patient’s data is secure all the way. It will be good if you go for experienced mobile medical app developers who have rich knowledge in this field to develop the mHealth app.
Step 5: Test & Launch
In the last stage of healthcare app development, consider that the healthcare app must be error-free and fast-performing before launching it in the market. Each issue related to the app must be resolved in the decided time and must not be repeated to ensure smooth working. Your hired mobile app testers will help you in this process by conducting different types of app testing.
Essential Tech Stack for a Healthcare Solution
Moving next, here we will discuss the required technology stack for mobile healthcare app development. The usage of the right technology stack plays a crucial role to make an app succeed and stay competitive in the market. Here are the top-notch healthcare app development tools and technologies to integrate-
- Back-end Server– Apache or NGINX
- Frameworks– Laravel
- Database Servers– MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL
- Cloud Hosting– AWS
- Front-end Technologies– Cross-platform (Flutter or React Native), Android (Java), iOS (swift).
- Payment Gateways– PayPal, Stripe, Braintree
- Utilities– Visual Website optimizer, Google analytics, Mixpanel
How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Healthcare App?
Now, you have been aware of all the aspects related to the healthcare mobile app development process, are you interested to know about the cost to develop a mHealth application? The cost to create a medical or healthcare app depends on various aspects such as app design complexities and functionalities, different technologies, number of platforms, customization, list of features, team structure, the experience of the mobile app development company, etc.
Based on these aspects, the cost to develop a healthcare app would be around $20,000 to $30,000 comprising all the essential features developed for a single platform. If you want a mobile app compatible with both platforms Android and iOS involving advanced features, then you must have a higher budget for this.
Final Words
We all have been observed the growth of on-demand app development services in the healthcare sector over the years that has facilitated people with advanced medical assistance. Along with providing people easy access to medical & healthcare facilities, the healthcare development sector has also helped in the enlargement of new-age businesses.
Yes, you heard it right! Several businesses are showing great interest to invest in this industry. If you are one of them, you can read the above-mentioned guide to get an idea about how to develop a healthcare app? If you are looking to hire a healthcare app development company and want to discuss your idea, you can get in touch with SemiDot Infotech. Our expert team of designers & developers will surely help you with a great solution!
