Healthcare is the most sought-after industry when it comes to introducing tech innovations. Both doctors and patients are seeking solutions that can make health monitoring easier. Because of this reason, healthcare app development is gaining popularity around the globe.
The benefits of healthcare mobile app development are numerous. It helps monitor the state of the patient’s health, making the work of medical practitioners easier and streamlined.
The best part is that healthcare apps allow consumers to monitor their medical conditions, personal fitness goals, and other health-related problems seamlessly.
In this blog, we’re going to talk about everything you need to know about healthcare application development and a step-by-step guide on how you can build an app that has the potential to stir the market.
Let’s get started!
What is A Healthcare App?
As the name suggests, a healthcare app is a mobile application that assists its users in managing their health and accessing medical services. It serves various purposes, such as:
- Fitness tracking – Users can monitor their dietary and exercise patterns. They can also set goals for themselves and design their customized health routine with the help of healthcare apps.
- Making appointments – Users can make appointments with medical practitioners.
- Regulation of medication intake – Users can set reminders for their medication and keep track of their schedule through health apps.
- Monitor Symptoms – Users can efficiently monitor their symptoms and track vital signs.
- Tracking menstrual cycle – Women can also track their menstrual cycle through healthcare apps specially designed for the same.
- Remote Monitoring – Medical practitioners can use healthcare mobile apps to remotely monitor the vitals of their patients.
Types of Mobile Health App Development
With the advent of professional healthcare app development services, there are many emerging types of healthcare mobile app development solutions. Here are the types of mobile healthcare apps:
Telemedicine
A Telemedicine app is a healthcare app that makes it possible for patients to access medical care remotely. These kinds of apps can offer numerous services including –
- Medical advice and diagnosis
- Remote monitoring
- Appointment scheduling
- Virtual consultations
- Tracking of health data
People have now become more open to Telemedicine apps that are fast, convenient, and of high quality. Furthermore, it came to its full potential during the pandemic. Wherein, it was not only beneficial for patients but also for healthcare professionals.
Medical professionals can make use of these revolutionary apps to create their profiles, give out prescriptions, marking appointments in the in-app calendar, and automating the entire process of the treatment.
Remote Patient Monitoring
Physicians are increasingly using remote patient monitoring healthcare apps to enhance patient care, especially for older adults. A prime example is the WHO ICOPE Handbook App, developed by the World Health Organization. Here’s how it benefits healthcare providers and patients:
- Improved Care for Older Adults: The app is designed to assist healthcare providers in delivering better care to older individuals, helping to address their specific needs.
- Remote Monitoring: This technology allows physicians to monitor elderly or chronically ill patients from home, reducing the need for in-person visits.
- Reducing Hospital Risks: Patients who are at high risk can avoid potentially dangerous hospital visits by receiving remote care, enhancing safety and comfort.
- Automated Monitoring: The app, when paired with wearable devices, can continuously monitor a patient’s condition and send alerts to physicians, eliminating the need for round-the-clock manual monitoring.
- Faster Interaction: If necessary, healthcare providers can use the app to quickly connect doctors with their patients. This ensures faster responses and personalized care.
- Additional Features: These apps can also send medication and appointment reminders, while chatbots and other digital devices can promote healthy aging by providing valuable support to patients.
Reminder Apps
These apps remind people to take their medicines on time. If not as a standalone app it can be added as a feature in various doctor appointment apps or any other healthcare apps.
Healthy Lifestyle Apps
Apps like fitness apps, brain training apps, self-improvement apps, and many others that help others to make and maintain a healthy lifestyle easily come under this category. Most of these lifestyle apps can be combined with sleek wearable devices such as fitness wristbands and other training equipment.
These apps help in monitoring the physical activities of a person in totality such as the number of steps, amount of calories burned, tracking heart rate and pulse, etc.
You can build your own fitness or yoga routine app like Asana Rebel with the help of our expert developers and disrupt the market with a healthcare mobile app that’s not just efficient but also adds value to the user’s routine.
Appointment and Billing Apps
Healthcare apps are a mode of direct communication between patients and remote assistance. The increase in these apps has saved many lives as it is instant and interactive. With one click, these appointment healthcare apps help the patient find the right doctor and set the appointment!
Benefits of Building a Health App
Benefits for Doctors and Staff:
Faster processing and decision making – After integrating the records of patients, they experience faster processing and consulting from doctors who are quicker with decisions and prescriptions.
Accurate Diagnosis – Having a better look at the records, an accurate diagnosis comes with timely healthcare delivery, better treatment plans, and effective outcomes.
Improved communication – With remote access, telehealth application platforms help connect doctors with patients for important consultations and discussions that are both quick for communication and decrease the lapses due to better availability of the doctors.
Remote Assistance – This allows doctors to monitor patients’ health remotely and does not require any physical meet-up by contacting them through video calls, calls, or chat apps. It does not require patients to waste time getting to the hospital or standing in the queue or even leaving their houses.
Effective workload distribution – With the help of mHealth apps, doctors can set up appointments at the most suitable time. They also can manage essential tasks via mobile and web apps.
Brand awareness – With the lack of loyalty due to medical negligence and malpractices, having a mobile healthcare app bridges that gap in trust and boosts the brand awareness of the clinical doctor. As a result, patients and future prospects are more likely to choose the same clinic next time.
Benefits For Patients
Improved treatment process – Many mHealth apps make communication possible with just one click to arrange video calls and have a better consultation in place. Doctors also have all the tools that are required to examine patients. They can also prescribe a list of medicines that can control the drug regimen of the app.
Cost-efficiency – Many of these online appointments cost significantly less than personal appointments.
Online payment – You do not require any cash, your patients can schedule an appointment and make the payment in the app after which it is fast, convenient, and accessible.
Less stress and burnout – Healthcare software does not require patients to take up mundane administrative tasks by increasing the processing and reliability of the medical system.
It has been reported that removing paperwork from hospitals and medical centers has resulted in about 61% increased productivity among doctors and staff.
Better service and equipment management – With the help of modern-equipped technologies, healthcare organizations can now track equipment in real time and optimize its use accordingly.
Healthcare mobile app development helps in tracking all the active on-premise ventilators. They also track other equipment helps in a better track record of the maximum capacity.
How to Build A Healthcare App?
Healthcare mobile app development is not really a straightforward process. However, there are many such differences that are prominent from all the other apps that you need to consider. Here’s a list of a few quick steps that will help you avoid mistakes.
Identify Problems
The first basic step requires you to answer the fundamental question:
What problem do you want to solve with your app?
It could be that you want to make a fitness app or you want to minimize the cost of medicines. Consider the following factors before you build an app:
- Number of competitors
- Barriers to entry
- Feature list
- Target audience
Know Your Target Audience
The target audience is an entire market segmented by many factors such as country, age, education, profession, average income, and many much more such dimensions.
You must do intensive research on your target user. Firstly, you must decide the region where you might launch your application. There might be differences based on regions such as audience size, needs, and local regulations.
Use these criteria to divide your audience:
- Gender
- Age
- Average income
- Place of residence
Secondly, you must ask real users for their feedback about what they want to see in the mHealth app and what additions will make their experience better. This is a great way to get an exact image of what the target audience might expect.
Or you can go the easy way. Some people from your social circle might be using healthcare apps. You can communicate with them directly to collect feedback about their user experience.
Alternatively, you can also ask some people from your social circle about their experience of using such apps.
Do Market Analysis
Creating a healthcare app involves market-intensive research which involves analyzing the trends. You need to know more about your own field, know about the competition, and what changes they bring. Analyze and assess their weak and strong sides are, and how yours can be different.
Study Your Audience
You should try to maintain a professional environment. These apps generally deal with health issues like bulimia, anorexia, and mental disorders. While developing a healthcare app you must keep in mind all these serious issues and with it the sensitivity problems of people.
You can conduct interviews, focus groups, or surveys. All of these methods are a great way to know what people’s needs are, get an edge over the user’s problems, and maintain a healthy balance.
Even if you put a lot of work and money into building your health app development, it would be useless if you cannot get your app to your audience. That is why it is important to figure out the target audience for your healthcare mobile app development.
Choose App Type
The healthcare mobile app development type determines a lot of things: the app’s database, its functionality, and the app’s main goal. But most importantly, you must define the key points to the team like:
- The type of app needed
- How it functions
- The type of problems it solves
Create Design
Proper designing is key to the app’s success, the mHealth app design should be simple yet intuitive. Its main goal is to lead the user to their end goal smoothly and easily.
Keeping a user-friendly design the app must also have interaction points, so the user doesn’t have any problems while using the app. Also, you can reduce the cognitive load of your app to the maximum. That’s the best part about it.
Make It HIPAA Compliant
The healthcare topic is quite a sensitive one, and it takes a lot of work for healthcare mobile app development since creating a healthcare application isn’t simple. You must also comply with some regulations if you’re planning to create a healthcare app.
If you’re planning to launch your app in the US, your app must follow all the HIPAA regulations. Also, if you plan to launch it in Europe apps that process personal info must comply with the GDPR.
Build MVP
By now you must have already ensured to secure your services and pick a healthcare app type wherein the next step should be MVP development.
While building a healthcare app type, the very next step that you should be focusing on is MVP development. You have to start minding the fundamental MVP creation rules to build it fast and make it viable.
Read this guide on how to hire remote developers to develop the MVP of your healthcare app.
Prioritize the vital features of your app and then go for an MVP development to ensure that you can solve the problem and iterate them constantly. Most importantly, building an MVP gives you a competitive advantage and edge over your competitors as you
MVP gives you a competitive advantage because you enter the market faster as you start to get more genuine feedback. This actionable feedback from users before starting your healthcare mobile application development product is the right way.
How to Develop a Health App Features Checklist?
You must already know that healthcare mobile app development requires more or less similar processes to fitness app development when it comes to onboarding, user flow, and functionality. As a result, you get to use ready solutions and test out products.
Whereas, on the other side, building a health app MVP can be very different since hospital app development also has different types and sub-types. This is why you will have to decide on the set of key features that suit your app.
Here are some of the selective features that many other healthcare apps include:
- Registration
- Profile screen
- Search and filter options
- Surveys and forms
- Ratings and reviews
- Appointment scheduling
- Video and voice calls
- Online chat
- Payment options
- Collect Feedback, Update, and Repeat
For doctors, the features could include:
- Calendar
- Notifications
- Patients Health Portfolio
- Alerts
- Chats
- Doctor’s profile and records
Healthcare App Development Trends
Now let’s look at some of the trends in healthcare mobile app development.
Market Size and Projected Growth
According to research by Fortune Business Insights, The global mHealth apps market size was USD 33.17 billion in 2023. Furthermore, it is projected to grow from USD 36.68 billion in 2024 to USD 88.70 billion by 2032, exhibiting a CAGR of 11.7% during the forecast period.
Additionally, the U.S. mHealth app market is expected to experience substantial growth, with projections estimating that it will reach USD 22.14 billion by 2032. This expansion is due to the ongoing integration of advanced technologies and the increasing use of health applications in the States.
How Has COVID-19 Impacted the Demand for Healthcare Apps?
After the outbreak of the COVID pandemic in 2019, there has been an increase in the number of healthcare app downloads by 60% worldwide. This creates more opportunities for healthcare mobile app development.
More preventive healthcare and an increase in the funding of mHealth startups provide a major boost to these mobile healthcare apps and mobile medical app developers.
Healthcare mobile app development has become a part of clinical decision-making and analytics. Moreover, these apps provide data on unprecedented insights, treatment variability, patient outcomes, and diagnostics.
Key Takeaway:
Before anything else, a few things have to be considered before your healthcare mobile app development such as ensuring solid data security and interoperability.
Most importantly, when you develop your healthcare app, it must be HIPAA-compliant and should comply with all required legal and privacy rules. Otherwise, you will end up receiving a penalty.
If you are wondering about how to develop a healthcare or fitness app, this article gives you a brief on everything you need to know about the process. To kickstart your dream project, we at Resourcifi can help you with top-tier mobile app developers who can help you develop an extremely user-friendly app that gains engagement from your users. Contact us today to get a cost estimate of your project requirements!
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