The healthcare industry has been growing exponentially over the last few years, and it’s projected to grow even more as technology improves and lifestyles change.
The market for healthcare apps reached $60 billion in the United States in 2020. According to Accenture, 75% of patients know the benefits of health-related apps, and the mHealth market’s size is expected to reach $17.14 billion by 2026.
Along with this exponential growth come challenges in managing information and improving accessibility, ultimately leading to healthcare app development in 2023 and beyond.
Let’s get to the point! Once you have read this article, you will know where to start and in which direction to move.
Table of Contents
Need for Mobile Application Development for Healthcare
The development of mobile applications for health care is the process of applying digital technologies to create an application for mobile devices to help patients monitor health conditions, hospital vital signs, fitness goals physically, find doctors, etc.
mHealth (refers to mobile health) is a common term used to apply mobile technologies and devices (smartphones, wearable devices, tablets) for healthcare purposes. Healthcare apps help improve public health and medical practices and provide more excellent patient care through online consultations, service payments, access to patient history, and more.
You need to hire a mobile app development company with experience in delivering complex healthcare projects, from the planning stage of a project to successful development and launch.
Types of Healthcare App Development
You can choose from two approaches when developing a healthcare app. While some mobile healthcare apps simply serve doctors, others take care of the needs of patients’ development.
These medical apps are used by doctors and nurses for administrative tasks including staff training and patient monitoring. Mobile health applications for patients offer features, including patient monitoring and health management.
There are two different types of medical mobile app development services:
- Applications for professionals
- Applications for patients
Let’s discuss both of them in detail:
Type 1: Applications for Professionals
Nowadays, many healthcare applications enable doctors to remotely check their patient’s health. You need to understand the operating system of the app for medical development. Read on to know more.
- Working Model: They operate under a complicated and varied operating model. The main goal is to assist medical professionals and particular doctors in reducing friction between various procedures. You may create a unique solution with our healthcare mobile app development services. The working model can be divided into:
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- Networking for databases (Clinical and Patient Communication)
- Tracking Patient Health
- Physician Scheduling
- Risk Assessment
- Prescription and dosage of medications
- Telehealth
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- Revenue Generation: Professional healthcare apps help physicians generate income in two ways:
- Indirectly leveraging mobile healthcare apps to reduce costs by expediting the creation and execution of processes
- Directly the patient-facing development of revenue through subscription-based mobile health apps
- Limitations: The hospitals have their systems and operational capability. Therefore, narrowing down the purposes and objectives is crucial. Another difficulty is creating a mobile health consumer app that complies with HIPAA. The US has strict privacy laws that must be followed while creating healthcare applications.
Therefore, before creating your product, you should be aware of the requirements for mobile healthcare applications.
Type 2: Application for Patients
With the help of different sensors on modern smartphones and wearable devices, patients can share their health data with doctors, making patient care and diagnosis more accessible, quick, and accurate. The app provides advice on personal health and information on illnesses and medications. Let’s discuss the app further.
- Working Model: These follow a different path and operate from the patient’s standpoint. The functionality of patient applications and professional apps may eventually overlap.
- Revenue Generation: This type of healthcare application generates a lot of revenue. You can address patients’ pain points with efficient healthcare mobility solutions. In-app purchases are one of the best methods for generating income from a medical app concept. The Google Playstore only has 5.76% of the available applications.
The remaining ones are all free with in-app purchases. You can give your patients a free trial before charging them to use the applications for health care.
- Limitations: The patient segment is equally as large as the professional healthcare mobile application segment. It includes:
- Healthcare\sReminder\sDiagnosis
- Monitoring Your Health and Lifestyle
- Mental Wellness
- Women’s Health Apps On-Demand Doctor
Functions for the Development of Healthcare Applications
The development of mobile applications for healthcare is completely dependent on the functions that will be included in your solution.
They affect UI and UX design services, application development (client-side), back-end development (server-side), quality assurance, and additional maintenance. All of these services depend on the specific concept of the healthcare application project and the solution it provides.
Let’s now look at the most common features that you can include in healthcare application development:
1. Profile creation
As with any other mobile application, healthcare solutions usually have a user profile. After creating an account, patients can add their personal information (name, age, chronic diseases, insurance, etc.). This type of account can also provide the ability to store your health data and include a custom dashboard.
2. Tracing
This feature is the most important within a mobile healthcare application. It allows you to monitor a patient’s blood pressure, heart rate, calorie consumption, pulse, and glucose level. This feature is made possible through integration with wearable devices such as heart rate monitoring trackers, glucose meters, and other solutions.
3. Planning
This feature allows users to easily book a doctor visit or health specialist appointments. It is also possible to program a prescription for medications, sleep schedules, water consumption goals, etc. From a doctor’s perspective, they can efficiently manage their schedule and track how patients are following doctors’ prescriptions.
4. Pay
There is a growing trend towards the integration of mobile payments. Payment features allow users to pay for health or insurance services. Regular bill payments can also be made for doctor visits, emergency rooms, hospital admissions, etc. Online payment with a few clicks offers great user satisfaction.
5. File storage
EHR or Electronic Healthcare Records is used by both Patients and Doctors. This system allows physicians to store patient files and other information. The following details are frequently included in this characteristic of data gathering and retrieval:
- Identify and maintain patient records
- Capture external clinical documents
- Present treatment plans, recommendations, and procedures
- Manage patient demographics, problem lists, prescription lists, patient histories, clinical papers and notes
- Produce and document instructions unique to each patient
The remote functionality of the tool expands the viewing of medical imaging images. This operates by uploading and sharing photographs over a server that complies with HIPAA regulations. In some cases, it has been shown that evaluating scan images remotely using a medical device is just as successful as doing so at a regular workstation.
6. Geolocation
This is another feature that you should consider for your project. The availability of this feature can help patients find the help of a doctor in a nearby location.
7. Chat in real-time
The ability to chat with a doctor within an app will make services faster and help build trustworthy relationships between patients and healthcare providers.
8. Video conferencing
You can further take the communication part of your application by adding a video conferencing feature to the healthcare app development process. Developing telemedicine applications is a widespread practice today, as not all patients can visit the doctor in person.
With video conferencing, patients can have a hospital experience and visit the doctor’s office without leaving home.
9. Social Integration
However, social media login is an attractive feature to engage when integrating it into a healthcare app. You need to pay special attention to data security.
This feature should be optional, as many users find it unacceptable to share medical information with third-party services (via the Facebook SDK, for example). Therefore, your application’s privacy policy must clearly state that users share access to their profile information.
For those customers who choose to log into social media, please include multiple options like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.
10. Scores and Reviews
For applications that give access to information about healthcare personnel, this feature will be beneficial. First, any patient will be able to share her experience with a doctor and help other patients make decisions. Second, this will drive staff involvement in building loyal customer relationships.
The alternative functions of the application that can be included in a medical device are the following:
- On-click Ambulance
- Pill Reminder
- Hospital Wayfinding Map
- Prescriptions
- Notifications (push notifications)
Depending on the purpose of mobile healthcare application development, healthcare products may include the following functionalities.
How Much Does it Cost to Develop a mHealth Application?
After identifying all the features you want to include in your healthcare application development, you might wonder how much it costs to invest in a mobile app.
The price to build an MDP (Minimal Delight Product) for a healthcare app starts at $ 50,000 per single platform (iOS or Android or Web). The final price can reach $ 600,000 or even go much further.
The cost of healthcare app development depends on several factors:
- Pre-development, during which it is necessary to analyze the competition, the market stage, identify characteristics for implementation, etc.
- Number of platforms to target (iOS, Android, or both)
- Use of some specific technologies and innovations such as Machine Learning, AI, etc.
- App design complexity, including customizations, branding, animations, etc.
- Software development provider you choose to work with
Three things affect the total cost of development:
- The complexity of the application
- Choice of platform
- Development team
Let’s discuss all of them in detail.
1. The Complexity of the Application:
This means the applications you plan to design is at a basic, medium, or advanced level. The beginning of any application development life cycle requires research on what you are planning to get and what you want to achieve through it.
If you are a healthcare technology startup, it is better to go for a basic application structure. This structure includes necessary but simple functions with a standard user interface design.
You can hire app developer and get a basic app at the lowest price and cost, from around $70,000 to $ 100,000. These applications take about 3-6 months to complete.
For midsize companies, things can go up a notch. If you are a mid-size healthcare technology company, you can include all the necessary functions in your application, such as integrated payment processing, back-end server, dashboard, weekly / monthly report, and analytics functions.
All of this can cost you around $ 1,20,000 to $ 1,70,000 and takes 6-10 months to complete the task.
And suppose you plan to invest in the advanced level of this application. In that case, you might consider adding the following: great user interface, hassle-free wearable devices, a wide range of doctors to choose from, healthcare experts, pharmaceutical support, secure payment gateways, API integrations, multi-language support, and a lot more.
The modern and advanced health application can be developed from $ 200,000 to $ 250,000. The total duration is 10+ months..
2. Choice of the Platform:
Being a healthcare technology company, you can choose which platform you want to target, native or cross-platform.
There are over 4 million apps on the Google Play Store and the iOS app store, so targeting audience with a single app would be a smarter choice. You can go with the cross-platform application.
You can keep the functions simple; therefore, it will cost you $ 60,000 to develop an application for one platform, depending on your business requirements. Additionally, you can choose from the following languages: Flutter, React Native, Angular, and Vue. You can hire cross-platform mobile app developers.
But if you are working on a tight budget and have less time, you can target one platform at a time, i.e. Android or iOS.
3. Development team:
There is a flat hourly rate for the development team you hire. Also, you won’t deny the fact that nothing can beat the experience, resources and skill set of a professional software development company in India.
To develop a healthcare application, the team you will need and the company you will deliver your project to must be working on the latest technologies, methodologies, and trained teams.
The necessary equipment for health development is:
- Project manager
- App developers
- Back-end developers
- UI / UX Developers
- Quality control engineer
- Experts in application maintenance
Read Also: E-wallet Mobile App Development: Process & Key Features
Where to Go Next?
With major advances in technology, the healthcare sector has also changed the way it works. The greater integration of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning helps keep track of medical records. Finding the right consultation on time has also become more convenient than before.
If you are in the healthcare tech industry or planning to get started, you should stop using conventional methods. Invest in a health and fitness app. With all the details mentioned above, I hope I have done my part.
If you want to discuss your idea, you can get in touch with the expert India healthcare app development company in India. Only an expert can help you find a great solution.
If you have any further questions or queries, comment below. Until then, stay healthy!
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Thank you for writing such a fantastic piece on the topic – it was much needed. The depth with which you have written is highly appreciated. There are a lot of valuable insights that we got from this blog.