Hopefully, you have set out to create a Healthcare App because you’ve diagnosed a real pain point that a medical app can solve not just because another smarty-pants is heralding the multi-billion-dollar mobile health industry. 

Besides, it’s true: the other side of Healthcare has burned most in search of creating a healthcare app – the bills, long queues, exhausted care practitioners baffling between an increasing patient-to-physician ratio.  

Ultimately, this “radicalization” brings innovation. Presently, healthcare apps like Medscape deliver patient care into the hands of the people – literally. But, that’s halfway done. 

The experience of leading mobile app development companies in Dubai proves that a healthcare product is successful when it’s founders are passionate about improving people’s life. 

Let’s say you have figured out the passion.

Are you familiar with the steps you need to create a healthcare app that will transform people’s lives? 

Don’t worry. This guide makes sure you are covering all the imperatives. Here you will find answers to the most frequent questions on how to create a medical app.

#Imperative 1: Healthcare App Market In 2020

If you are wondering about creating a medical app, it’s worth knowing the market.

A Quick Sneak Of The Industry

Over the past few years, digitalization has taken as a storm across all industries, especially healthcare. With 2020, definitely making history as the year of COVID-19, has made quite a splash not in our lives but also in the health app market.

This especially holds true for mobile healthcare apps, fitness and medical apps, fitness and wellness apps having the lion’s share in the entire mHealth market. With the mHealth app market reaching an all-time high at $ 58.8 billion in 2020, it exhibits a high growth potential for the IT industry.

As every aspect of healthcare has to do with telemedicine, Artificial Intelligence and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) and got an upthrust of approximately around 300% in investment.

With doctors and patients searching for a right mobile app development company to fill voids while keeping their distance; telehealth apps continue to dominate the space. You’ll see more telemedicine and RPM solutions in the coming years, but let’s delve and find what’s happening with healthcare apps in the store at nonce. 

Statista says there are 88,000 mHealth apps in Apple’s App Store and Google play store combined. Whatever the case, the competitive trajectory is difficult to compete. 

Also, increasing concerns about their health will further escalate mobile health service demand for 2018-2026.

Simultaneously, if you check the top-ranking mHealth app in both stores, it’ll be one-size-fits-all apps without much versatility. You will be scrolling through lots of fitness apps, period tracker, a meditation app, calorie counter before you try hands on a simple yet beneficial telemedicine app like Medscape.

#Imperative 2: Healthcare App Eye-Catching Benefits

What if I tell you half of the people who get involved with these telemedicine apps open themselves up for numerous benefits in the present and down the road.

Let us have a look at some of the most eye-catching benefits mHealth has to offer.

Improvisation In Patient Outcome

A reliable and beneficial mHealth app cut slack to patients on a lot of fronts like visiting clinics and hospitals for follow ups, seeking medications, missed appointments, or also for asking prescriptions over and over again. 

This benefits the patient in many ways, and that is they get the right attention from their doctors, despite rushy clinic visits. In return, it improves their overall experience. 

Minimum Paperwork

This is considered one of the significant benefits of telemedicine apps. They allow healthcare practitioners and patients to record the crucial details on their mobile app quickly. 

This offers tremendous relief to both the parties from the hassle of roaming here and there in maintaining in-office administrative paperwork. 

Maximum Convenience

App development companies in Dubai, USA, India and worldwide are doing wonderfully in telemedicine. The most relief that it’s offering is to the residents of rural areas as we know the difficulties they face when visiting a doctor or a medical specialist. 

So, to make an appointment, a rural resident will have to travel a long distance, and this eventually proves decisive in saving the life of a person when every second count. 

Pocket-Friendly Services

Since the mHealth care services prove to be a boon to people with easy availability to the people in real-time, there is automatically a lower down of all costs related to ER trips and hospital admissions. These processes have been made a lot more reasonable with the inception of telehealth solutions. 

A Higher ROI (Return On Investment)

These mHealth apps are beneficial to the doctors in equal measures as they help the practitioners cut down their expenses on instrument, hospital staff, and architecture and infrastructure. 

This simple step is directly assisting doctors in developing, deploying and maintaining a higher ROI.

#Imperative 3: Must-Have Features For A Successful mHealth App

To create a healthcare app that people would love to use means embellished with features that interact with users and offer them tangible benefits. For sure, the choice of features will depend on whether you want to create a mobile medical app for glucose level tracking, fitness or let’s say mental wellness or promoting patients easy monitoring. 

Still, there are numerous of must-have features that every health app should consider for an undefeatable success.  

HIPAA Compliance 

All PHI data must be kept safe and secure. In accordance with the HIPAA rules that every health must adhere to, make sure your app follows the same. Thus, it’s critical to encrypt data, offer two-factor authentication, use secure connections, and follow many other sets of protocols to keep everyone’s data safe from any breach. 

Integration With Health Kits 

Integration of your mHealth apps with health kit, Google FIt, Samsung health and many others along with doctor profiles, offer a competitive edge to your app. Moreover, it also helps to deal with patient data as these kits work as data hubs keeping user vitals. 

Patient & Doctor Profile 

Irrespective of Android or iOS app development, having an interactive dashboard is a must for the app. This is a patient-facing feature that allows patients to receive messages, alerts, and many other reminders from their physician or mentors all in one place. 

All app data is organized in user profiles that patients and doctors can edit at any point in time. Doctors’ profiles must include enough information about the expert so patients can make their choice easier. 

Real-time chat and video

This feature offers help to patients to connect with on-site physicians in case of any medical emergency, or to discuss treatment options or diagnoses. Everything available under one umbrella. 

Payment Portal 

Integrating payment portals offer an easy way for remote patients to remit payments, or for lifestyle users to purchase subscriptions packages or products. 

Telemedicine Options 

Having the potential to connect with reliable care providers in real-time through video calls or messaging has become necessary if you want to create a medical app that works efficiently regardless of the distance. 

Geolocation 

Including geolocation in your healthcare app is a quick way for prospective patients to find doctors near them, review credentials, and later use GPS to reach the clinic or nearby medical facility when their doctor works. 

Dashboards

Healthcare app dashboards prove to be a beneficial wham for both solo practitioners and healthcare facilities to aggregate patients information all in one place quickly. Simultaneously, they improve clinical efficiency and administration. 

Reporting Functions

Consider creating an app that accrues analytics information to review progress or monitor activity quickly. Minimized the reporting mistakes and maximized level of care.

Notifications and Reminders 

What makes the significant difference in mobile apps is how good your app is to keep you up-to-date on your prescriptions and medicine intake. These notifications are not essential to be time – but also location-rooted.

#Imperative 4: Steps To Create A mHealth App

#Step 1: You Want To Create A Healthcare App For

If you are here, the probability is that you already know your target audience. I have discovered that successful medical apps are always created by someone serving in the same vertical – either with a medical or nursing degree or working closely with healthcare providers. 

You require industry-oriented insights while developing medical software or a mobile healthcare app. 

Sketch Your Medical App’s Audience 

Get familiar with your potential app users. Their needs and pet peeves will bring every significant decision you are about to make when building the healthcare app. Keep in mind, it’s all about their context of using the solution: 

• Will they have both hands free?
• Will they face patients while using their app?
• Will the user be standing or sitting while using the app? 

Select A Suitable Platform

Myriad of questions influence the features you will be needing into the health app in accordance to your choice of mobile devices and platforms: 

• iOS or Android app development
• Tablets / smartphones / smart speakers / smartwatches
• AI integration by Microsoft /IBM /Google
• AR, VR or IoT integration 

The rough sketch is far from covering the complete spectrum of apps that you can easily create. Rather, it’ll help you to nutshell of your app idea quest and, eventually, will allow you to hone in on your target audience.  

And, by the way, thinking outside the box is always welcome. So, you must be wondering “Is there any place for a healthcare app game”?

Is there a place for a solution that connects to a smart pillbox and keep tracks of the medicine intake? 

Yes, there is!

#Step 2: Here’s How To Create A Healthcare App Without Line Of Code 

Yes, that’s right! 

There is no need to put yourself into conventional healthcare app development right after jotting together all the features and requirements. After all, every line of code is money gushing down from your pocket. 

So, why not to invest it on finalizing the concept of your iPhone healthcare app first. You can easily do this by prototyping – fleshing out medical features into clickable screens that appear almost identical to a real-life product. The magnetic element of a clickable prototype is: 

• You can quickly get a prototype in the hands of users A/B testing.
• Experience on the phone is like working with a real app.
• Also, you can validate with a developer if all features are easily feasible on a selected platform. 

And all these come without breaking your development budget. Regardless of being an ultra-important element when creating a healthcare app, UX and UI work accounts for a fraction of the complete cost, unlike coding. 

Presently, there is no shortage of interactive tools for quick prototyping. 

The bottom line is while prototyping, you are kind of creating your healthcare app, and, at the same time, you are skeptical. Only because at this point, your users can’t download the product or perform any non-hardwired action in the prototype.  

Finally,

#Step 3: Unskippable Elements To Consider While Creating A mHealth App

At this point, you have already pocketed the features that should be in your healthcare app. And the click-through prototype, you are fully equipped, and nothing can stop you from revealing your healthcare app’s development, right? 

But not instantly if you are looking to create an exceptional healthcare experience for your users. The leading mobile app development company advises you to consider these three points if anything is there is to ensure you are building a health app that will make an everlasting impact. 

APIs and Integrations

To allure in modern power users and early entrants, your app will casually integrate with other services. That’s how you facilitate the location and proximity data, make use of credentials offered by integrated health kit, work with EHR systems, and do a lot of other wonders with your own healthcare app. 

Ensure if the corresponding APIs are available for commercial use and whether you are in need to open source your code after using them. 

Security and Compliance 

Don’t worry; it’s not about the conventional HIPAA compliance that should be in place whenever a patient’s protected health information (PHI) is at play. Depending on your healthcare app’s type and functionality, you will be required to wrap your head around. 

Agile and Delivery 

Undoubtedly, agile is one of the success mantras. Well, it’s high time to start practising. When you create a healthcare app, it’s crucial to realize that proceeding by brief, one-week scrums, you are probably to arrive at the desired destination faster and with fewer iterations. 

Then, there comes the time to test the completed scope and make the alterations if required. 

Another aspect you should be paying attention is to offer continuous delivery. The team creating your healthcare app must set up a surrounding that allows QA testers to test full features without interfering with the development of the next round of features. 

Having developed numerous mobile and cloud technology healthcare apps, success comes with engaging user experience and competitiveness of focusing on the customer. 

That’s why experts always start with a free project estimation for rapid prototyping. 

Conclusion

Even though Xicom has touched upon many things eclipsing medical app development, there is always something extra that they uncover to deliver to their potential clients and partners.

If you are still searching to start your medical app, follow the above-outlined steps along with a dedicated developers team that offers you the best way to code.