Healthcare Application Development Guide: Types, Features, Challenges
Are you in the healthcare industry and want to score a home run? Here is an easy way to do it.
With an estimated revenue of $111.1 billion in 2025 MedicApp market is bound to blaze. Here is a guide to making sure you get a piece of the pie.
Technology is constantly changing the way we live our lives, From living in the metaverse to getting a prescription on a smartphone app, our lives are transforming fast. The innovation in smartphone apps or as we like to call it “appnovation” is taking over every industry and healthcare is not behind. The booming app market with its ability to keep you in close touch with your audience, healthcare as we knew it has changed. Smartphone medical applications are becoming increasingly popular around the world, with more people using them for everything from medical treatments to general health and well-being. Every indicator points towards the Healthcare application development boom which brings us to an all-important question.
Whether run a small ENT clinic or a giant multi-speciality hospital, smartphone apps keep you close to your patients in the moments they need you the most. It is a stamp of assurance that tells your patients “We are right by your side”. If your Healthcare or wellness business lacks an app, your patient might knock on a different door than yours. An app for your patients shows that they are getting the entire bundle. Technology runs the world today and you need to make sure it is contributing to your healthcare and wellness business.
Before making a decision to hire a mobile health app development service for your healthcare business. A few questions might pop into your head;
- What types of healthcare apps exist?
- What features do healthcare apps have?
- What am I missing by not having a healthcare app?
- What features do healthcare apps have?
- Are these apps secure?
- How to develop a medical app?
- What is the importance of App Developers in Building Healthcare Solutions for the Future?
Let’s answer these and other questions that might pop up in your head.
What types of healthcare apps exist?
The good thing about custom-made iOS and Android apps is that all the ingredients are designed considering the parties that use them i.e; Medicos and patients. The app design varies depending on the targeted user and is broadly classified into Providers Interface and Patients Interface.
For HealthCare providers
1. Patient Monitoring
Healthcare Android and iOS-based apps allow healthcare professionals to keep track of their patients’ conditions and progress during their treatment. The apps can store medical test results for patients, which doctors can access at any time.
2. Healthcare Reference & Database
Physicians can keep all data on various ailments, medical conditions, drugs, and prescriptions in one place using these apps. These reference apps can assist clinicians in staying current on medical information.
3. Professional Connections
These apps function as a social network for healthcare workers, allowing them to share information, ask and answer questions, and communicate as a group.
4. Apps for Doctor Appointments and Clinical Assistance
Physically keeping handwritten appointment journals is inconvenient and, in most circumstances, obsolete. These apps may be used to book appointments, remind patients and doctors about impending checkups, change schedules, and keep track of other important information.
Mobile Apps for Patients
From the perspective of staying healthy, Healthcare Apps are life-changing and help both patients and general users keen to live a healthy lifestyle. The Android and iOS apps come loaded with features like
1. Patient Health Education
Healthcare apps can educate patients about different health conditions by sharing useful, up-to-date information.
2. Diagnosis
Medical apps are beneficial for prevention since they help patients understand their symptoms and seek care when necessary.
3. Reminder
iOS and Android based healthcare apps provide reminders to take medicines, rest, and follow healthy practices and lead an active lifestyle. They are also used for tracking and forming healthy habits like staying hydrated, getting enough rest, etc.
4. Health Monitoring
Healthcare Apps help patients with chronic health conditions such as cancer, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases to monitor their conditions around the clock and take necessary precautions.
5. Mental Health
These include apps for meditation, self-care, stress relief, and good sleep that people use to take care of their mental health. Mobile health app development has taken leaps in the last few years and the future looks more promising than ever.
6. Healthy Living
These include weight loss, fitness, exercise, and wellness apps that help people lead healthier lives.
7. Nutrition
These include diet and weight loss applications, and they usually come with features like healthy recipes, trackers, and healthy eating guides.
8. Women’s Health
These include diet and weight loss applications, and they usually come with features like healthy recipes, trackers, and healthy eating guides.
9 Key Features for an Effective Healthcare Mobile App Development
What goes into making an awesome healthcare app? Let’s take a look.
Every medical application should be user-friendly. Since they store a lot of patient information, they must be integrated with the best data security features. But, beyond these essential features, what are the value-added features that will make your app stand out in a crowded mobile app development market? Let’s have a look at a few of them:
1. Tracking
Monitoring the patient’s vital indicators, such as blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar levels, pulse, calorie intake, and so on, is the most important element of any patient app.
2. Scheduling & Reminders
This feature offers hassle-free doctor appointments. It can also schedule reminders for medicine intake, sleep, water intake, daily calorie consumption targets, etc.
3. Social Media Sign-In
You can do a quick social media sign-in on the patient app. Many users, though, are wary of sharing personal information with third-party social media applications, so you’ll need to spell out the extent of social media access to personal accounts in your app’s privacy policy. In the process of healthcare app development privacy needs to be given special consideration, any infringement of privacy can lead to customer dissatisfaction.
4. Physician Information
Healthcare mobile application development integrates features like physician information Through this feature, medical app users can look up doctors by specialty, availability, location, and other parameters. They can also research a doctor’s profile in detail before booking an appointment.
5. Patient Information Database
Medical apps enable the software to store prescriptions, medical history, reports, and other sensitive data that both patients and physicians access at any time. Medical mobile app development also integrates cloud-based systems to make data storage more convenient.
6. Real-time Chats
Through this feature, patients can engage with their physicians in real time and get timely assistance. This feature facilitates easy access to healthcare and can establish trust between doctors and patients.
7. Geolocation
Imagine a patient is away from his usual healthcare clinic and needs immediate assistance. This feature with integrated map services (Google Maps or any other 3rd party map service) can inform patients about nearby hospitals. Medical mobile application development can also help healthcare providers find a patient in case of an emergency.
8. Reviews & Ratings
Through these features, medical apps can provide valuable feedback and share their treatment experiences with others. This will help patients decide better and build credibility and patient loyalty for the healthcare service.
9. Payment Gateway
Mobile health application development integrates phone payments with the latest digital payment features (wallets, credit/debit cards, net banking, etc.) enabling patients to safely and conveniently pay for treatment and/or insurance. Patients can also access copies of bills for documentation purposes.
Depending on your requirements, you can also add these extra features:
Photo Gallery
Analytics
Prescriptions
File sharing capabilities
Voice & video calls
Access to information (medicines, patient history, diseases)
Access to EHRs/EMRs
Lab Appointment Booking
Push Notifications
Wearable Integration
One-Click Emergency Service
Report Management
This list is not exhaustive as technology adds new features every day. Healthcare apps are improving every day and with every improvement constant enhancements need to be made.
Are healthcare apps secure?
Healthcare apps store and process a lot of personal data such as patient history, address, contact information, payment details, etc. So they need to comply with strict privacy and legal regulations, which vary from region to region. When hiring an app development agency, you must ensure that the software developers pay attention to risk identification and mitigation, authentication, app expiration, and data encryption management, as part of the development process. If the process and any element of medical mobile app development do not comply with these regulations, you can be penalized.
Let’s look at a few privacy regulations from different markets:
United States of America
If you’re building a healthcare app for the US market, you need to ensure it complies with HIPAA regulations if it processes, records, and stores Protected Healthcare Information (PHI).
Developers also need to focus on CCPA or the California Consumer Privacy Act) and GDPR or the General Data Protection Regulation, especially in the early stages of development.
Mobile medical applications that process electronic healthcare records in the USA also have to follow the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) guidelines that define standards to protect user data.
Canada
Apps made for the Canadian market must follow the PIPEDA or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act guidelines, except for Alberta, Quebec, and British Columbia, which are regions with their own privacy regulations that are slightly different.
United Kingdom
The Data Protection Act of 1988 defines the privacy and security regulations that medical apps have to comply with, in the UK. App developers can also visit the NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) website to avail of information on various topics related to personal data security.
It’s important to note that despite Brexit, application software processing private information must abide by GDPR rules.
European Union
In the European Union, healthcare apps need to be compliant with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) implemented in May 2018.
Developers also need to be aware of the NIS (Network and Information Security) directive as well as the International Standards guidelines. While not obligatory, the ISO badge is a sign of credibility and responsibility among medical apps.
7 steps to develop a Healthcare app
1. Identify a Problem
There are a ton of mobile healthcare applications available on the market. How will yours add value to end customers and distinguish you from the competition? Before creating a mobile healthcare app one needs to uncover the gaps your product can fill and the problems it might potentially answer, You’ll need to perform extensive market and competitor research. Building a healthcare app for the US market requires one to do some market research like speaking with doctors, nurses, hospital management staff, patients, and other core audiences that can give you insight on how to build a genuinely helpful, practical product. The cost of building a healthcare app is negligible compared to the competitive edge it gives your business.
2. Understand Your Audience
Did you know, about 75% of US hospitals have tried to offer a health app without carrying out a preliminary analysis of their core audience? As a result, only about 2% of the patients used them. Understanding your target audience helps you gauge their exact pain points and needs from your app, which you can use to develop a custom healthcare solution that’s effective. Before hospital mobile app development Conduct extensive market research to know the requirements of both medical professionals and patients. You must understand your target market and all the necessary regulations you need to abide by when developing the product. This will help you create a practical, efficient app, as well as understand the improvements needed in the subsequent versions. (same as original)
3. Conceptualize a Design
Understanding your target audience is critical for medical app development. Generally, an older audience likes simple navigation and bigger fonts while a younger audience prefers colorful UI with better functionalities. The design will also depend on whether your audience is patients or healthcare professionals. Study your competitors’ products and do a SWOT analysis to understand how to give your medical app an edge. Keep in mind that the UI design will make or break the product, so invest time and resources accordingly to get it right. Before initiating the healthcare Android and iOS app development we get down to the last bit of design and every small feature to make sure our clients are more than satisfied.
4. Begin by Creating an MVP
Medical application development can be a costly affair. It’s always recommended to begin by developing an MVP (minimum viable product). Use solutions that are already available when building the first working version of your app. Ensure all third-party integration is seamless.
5. Test & Gather Feedback
The reason to start the health application development with an MVP app development is to be able to test it, add required functionalities to the product, and avoid large-scale glitches. Remember, the application needs to be released as soon as possible. It can then be updated subsequently with market feedback. User feedback, ratings, beta, and distribution tests help capture bugs, and other issues you can fix and ensure the product is improved in each upgrade. On the contrary, if you release the completed product all at once, it may still have massive errors.
6. Widespread Distribution
App distribution depends entirely on its purpose. That health mobile app development for a specific group of users can be downloaded from a generated link. For a wider audience inside a particular organization, it’s advisable to make a private enterprise app store. This can give software developers access to analytics that enable them to work on future upgrades. Healthcare application development in the USA
7. Monetization
The ways to monetize your medical app are limitless. You can opt for in-app purchases, advertisements, or app subscriptions. However, most institutions like hospitals, clinics, etc. develop healthcare apps not to monetize them but to provide better healthcare to patients. Be it hospital app development, mobile healthcare app development, or apps to monitor fitness and activity, the capability to monetize will also depend on how well your app is built and we take care of you for that.
Quality apps to ensure a better healthcare future; the role of developers
Why do medical apps fail, despite years of research, design, and development efforts? There could be many reasons:
Poor UI and UX
Poor compliance with privacy regulations
Development without solid vision, concept, and purpose
Lack of understanding of the healthcare industry
Mediocre/Unnecessary Complex content
Lack of Adequate Testing
Lack of Skills
The last point is the most critical piece of the puzzle and can only be resolved by hiring the right software development team for your health application development. When you’re outsourcing mobile medical application development, choosing the right development partner can be quite challenging.
Always look for relevant industry experience while analyzing possible partners for app development for healthcare. Request to browse their portfolio of relevant items. Inquire about their approach, privacy understanding, and data security regulations. Meet the people who will be working on your project to get a sense of their experience, abilities, and professionalism. When it comes to healthcare application development services, one must consider the easy-to-use UI as many health demographics come from senior citizens. Examine how comfortable they will be with criticism and modifications, as well as the average turnaround time. Check their expertise with both Android healthcare application development and iOS as well.
At Tech Exactly, we put ourselves in the shoes of a client to understand their business needs and our expertise in app development healthcare speaks for itself. We understand how inconvenient it is for organizations to cope with defective code, project delays, poor UI/UX, and poorly implemented data security and privacy aspects. We believe that the perfect partner of choice is a client’s trusted advisor who assists you in bringing your vision to life and gives it to you at healthy prices too, that’s why we came up with the tagline:
Health Apps at Healthy Prices
We always recommend you check references and a development agency’s market reputation to create healthcare application development from reviews, ratings, and testimonials. Remember, the portfolio only tells half the story. You’ll need to work with a team that’s trustworthy, ethical, patient, understands your vision, and is as passionate about executing it as you are. Last but not least trust your gut; If something feels off, chances are it is or will be!
Final Thoughts
The advancements in mobile technologies and healthcare application development are driving the future of healthcare. The mobile health business is predicted to grow at a CAGR of roughly 41% by 2020. With the growing demand for efficient, user-friendly, and secure medical applications, now is the time to invest in health app development and produce solutions for the future. Tech Exactly takes pride in curating cutting-edge iOS and Android healthcare mobile app development services and now that you know your healthcare business needs one. We await your call.
