Businesses in the healthcare industry constantly aim to make a difference by looking for genuine ways to help people’s lives. They seek to achieve this through selling healthcare products, educational content, or through launching an app that helps them solve their health-related issues easier.
However, healthcare mobile app development is not an easy endeavor, especially if you are unfamiliar with the significant amount of work that goes into creating a truly useful application.
To help you get started with healthcare mobile app development, we’ve asked our development experts to share their tips for success on the topic.
Table of Contents
- What Is Healthcare App Development?
- Types of Healthcare Applications
- Healthcare Mobile App Development in 5 Steps
- Benefits of Healthcare Mobile App Development for Patients and Doctors
- Modern Features in Healthcare Mobile Applications
- Stellar Healthcare App Examples
- Final Thoughts on Healthcare Mobile App Development
- Healthcare Mobile App Development FAQs
What Is Healthcare App Development?
Healthcare app development is the process of creating applications that meet the needs of patients and healthcare providers. Mobile apps may have various features and serve different purposes, such as enabling communication between doctors and patients, electronic health record management, providing medical information and telemedicine services, or monitoring vitals.
Healthcare app revenue reached $3.6 billion in 2023, with the sector boasting over 311 million global users. Experts believe that the global mHealth apps market size will grow from $80.87 billion in 2023 to $861.40 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 40.2% during the forecasted period.
Types of Healthcare Applications
Healthcare applications usually cater to the needs of three particular audiences, including doctors, patients, and medical administration.
Understanding your target audience will determine the list of features it will have.
Patient Applications
These software types will cater to the needs of patients and require features like appointment scheduling, habit tracking, automated reminders, self-diagnosing tools, wellness and fitness monitoring, telehealth services, social support networking, mental health tracking and resources, IoT integration, and more.
Provider Applications
These tools are tailored to the needs of medical professionals, helping them speed up and streamline their care services and diagnostics. Such applications may include features like telemedicine consultations, diagnostics support, remote patient monitoring, medicine reference guides, electronic health record access, clinical internal communications, and appointment management.
Medical Administration Staff Applications
These apps help streamline the administrational aspect of healthcare, with features like advanced and optimized billing options, nurse and doctor marketplaces, electronic medical records, practice management options, and more.
Healthcare Mobile App Development in 5 Steps
As mentioned above, app development can be a lengthy and often expensive endeavor. However, if you ensure to follow these steps, you can optimize the process and avoid wasting time and resources.
1. Understand Your Business and Audience
If you are reading this article, you already probably know who your target audience is and the truth is, you can’t build a successful app without having the right industry specific insights at your fingertips.
Define Your Audience
Who are your potential users? Are you designing an app promoting healthy habits for patients? A communication platform for doctors? Or are you a B2B company aiming to create a medical equipment monitoring application? Knowing who you are designing the application for will help you fine tune the sole purpose of the app and define its main features.
Define Your Platform
Knowing who the app is for and what kind of pain points it'll address is only one side of the equation. Choosing the ideal platform will also play an integral part in its success. Typically, you can choose from several platforms and devices. Will it be for Android or iOS systems? Will it support VR, AR, or IoT? Will it be solely for smartphones and tablets? Or will it support other devices like smart speakers or watches?
2. Dive Head-First Into App Prototyping
Once you’ve put the above list together, you shouldn’t start with development right away. Finalize the concept and fine-tune every feature before getting started with coding. This is called prototyping and includes fleshing out all the features into clickable screens that resemble the real-life product.
There are several benefits to prototyping, including:
- You can see how the app will look like and function on a phone or any other device.
- Prototypes can be sent out to users for A/B testing, ensuring that only the best features will get into the final product.
- Gain quick verification of whether all the planned features are feasible on the selected platform.
Prototyping is essential, as fixing a design flaw early on, when no actual lines of code have been written, can be significantly cheaper than if done during the later stages of development. There are also several excellent tools like Proto.io or Balsamiq which are great for getting started or you can choose more complex solutions like InVision and Adobe XD, which require more technical knowledge.
3. Develop With an Eye for Detail
By now, you have all your features and a prototype sorted. The next important step is to assess every aspect of the process to build a truly exceptional healthcare experience. What are we talking about? Focus on the things below.
Security, Compliance and Privacy
In addition to the standard HIPAA compliance that protects patient data, you may also want to assess other privacy and security concepts, depending on the type of app you’re building and the functionalities it will have.
For example, you may want to familiarize yourself with the following:
- Android.os.health documentation for Android’s health connect that allows healthcare apps to share and store on-device data in a unified ecosystem
- MFi Program to connect smart hardware accessories to other Apple devices
- Security regulations such as the GDPR or the HITECH Act
- Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for HealthKit and CareKit
- SOC2 Type2, ISO 27001, IEC 62304, and other patient or customer data handling standards
The main takeaway is that patient data should always be in encrypted format traveling in a secure connection from platform to platform.
Integrations and APIs
To broaden your app’s reach, you’ll likely want to integrate your app with other services. This guarantees that it can work with electronic health record systems, use proximity and location data, etc. Before commencing with development, ensure that all the APIs you need are available for you.
Divide Tasks and Deliver Continuously
Sit down with your developers and create a detailed brief of the development cycle, documenting every vital step in the process. This will ensure that the final product will be developed faster, and possibly with fewer delays.
Ensure that there’s enough time for testing and allow room for mitigating any issues if such arise.
Consider Legacy Systems
While software development in the healthcare industry has undergone a massive shift, many hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare organizations may still use outdated or old content management systems, databases, and customer relationship management platforms.
Ideally, you would get the data out of these legacy platforms and implement it into a new infrastructure. However, not every organization has the budget to revamp their entire system. As such, strive to create an app that will operate flawlessly on these legacy systems, which will start getting replaced, often component by component.
To tackle this problem, consider developing a HIPAA- compliant data hub that doubles as a syncing link between your novel app and the old systems. This will ensure that the outdated software will be able to share the data with the new application through a set of APIs and vice versa.
4. Market the Application and Seek Improvement Opportunities
Once you’ve developed the app and released it on Google Play, the App Store or distributed it to your B2B partners, you’re still not at the end of the development process. Good mobile app marketing isn’t just about ensuring that people know about your product. You should listen and look for opportunities to improve the app too.
Source: Google Play
Take Advantage of User Metrics
If you worked on the project with experienced developers, then your app must be capable of integrating with analytics software that gathers user metrics. Once you’ve gathered and interpreted the data, you can make tweaks to help you reach certain objectives, such as:
- Improve user experience
- Encourage users to use your app for longer
- Look for ways to make more frequent purchases in your app
Don’t Shy Away from Feedback
Gathering user feedback is always a good idea. Understanding your users’ likes and dislikes allows you to optimize user experience and boost engagement with new updates that improve popular features and delete unused ones.
Keep an Eye Out for OS Updates
You may also introduce new features as you update your app to support new versions of your native operating system. In most cases, OS updates won’t hurt the function of your running app, but rolling out an update can often be a better idea as you will be able to use the latest OS features and avoid accumulating potential technical debt which can be a costly issue to fix down the line.
Keep Tabs on Competition
It’s never a bad idea to keep a close eye on your competitors and what kind of features they launch. You can use App Store monitoring tools like Sensor Tower to gather valuable intelligence about your niche competitors’ Google Play and App Store rankings.
Understanding the most coveted features in your competitors’ apps or how they address specific marketing challenges and technical difficulties can help you brainstorm ideas to overcome the issues you faces and gain competitive advantage in the process.
5. Create an Ecosystem Around the App
By this stage, you will have an app that’s receiving constant updates. A good idea would be to assess the ways you can offer more value to your users by extending to more platforms or integrations like connecting your phone app with a smartwatch. Or creating a progressive web app version of your product.
Assess possible growth points and build your app into an entire digital ecosystem.
Benefits of Healthcare Mobile App Development for Patients and Doctors
Healthcare software and medical mobile apps can have a myriad of benefits both for providers and patients. Let’s explore the most prominent advantages of professional healthcare apps.
Mobile Apps for Patients:
1. Enhance Quality Care
With different available software automations, patients have the chance of receiving personal plans and tailored therapies in a more streamlined way, without the need for taking a visit to the practice.
2. Allow Better Control Over Health Records
Patients can easily transfer and share their medical data with other institutions. All records are in the same digital place, and there’s no need for storing them physically.
3. Provide On-Demand Care
Thanks to healthcare apps, some medical services have become as easy as ordering food or booking hotel stays. As such, providers can also deliver services faster, be it remote consultations or meds delivery.
4. Enable More Secure Payments
Credit card-based in-app payments can be easily integrated into apps by development teams, guaranteeing significantly enhanced user experience.
5. Increase Engagement
Cleverly designed e-health solutions also enable patients to have more control over their care and therapy. For instance, they can easily check medical instructions on their phone, schedule appointments while viewing all the free available slots, and calculate how slight diet changes can affect their weight loss and health goals, to name just a few.
Mobile Apps for Doctors
Healthcare app development can be a long and costly process. As such, medical experts, stakeholders, and investors also need to be aware of the value they can gain from such a project.
1. Improve Decision-Making and Diagnostics
The available data from the app can help practitioners make faster decisions and prescribe more tailored therapies. It may also empower more accurate diagnosis, enabling doctors to craft better treatment plans in a timely manner and thus improving outcomes.
Additionally, this could provide them with more quality time to spend with their patients or allow them to treat more people.
2. Lessen Stress and Improve Communications
Applications can take over the mundane tasks medical experts need to do. Apps can also increase the overall efficiency of a practice’s health system and eliminate paperwork, possibly boosting morale, too. Telemedicine platforms can also help doctors consult each other more efficiently, regardless of their location, practice area, and clinic.
3. Ease Equipment and Hospital Management
Cutting-edge technologies like IoT enable clinics to track their equipment continuously and update their function in real-time. For instance, developers can create apps for hospitals that allow tracking the location and performance of on-premises ventilators.
4. Reduce Healthcare Provision Costs
Less paperwork, timely maintenance of on-premises and remote equipment, improved communications, more precise diagnostics, and better tailored therapies may all lead to reduced costs of healthcare services.
Modern Features in Healthcare Mobile Applications
The most innovative technologies of our time are also present in modern medical application development. By taking advantage of these features and using them to create your app, you can greatly improve user experience and see better adoption rates both among doctors and patients.
Below are just some examples to consider.
Artificial intelligence
AI has been gaining a substantial amount of ground lately and has become pivotal in several medical areas. Healthcare software with machine learning algorithms can help with honing in on health trends, precise diagnostics, and analyzing copious amounts of data. In real-life situations, intelligent chatbot may take up conversation with patients to learn more about their condition and point them to the most suited specialist by the end of the conversation.
For instance, Haut.ai offers AI-powered skin recommendations through taking selfies and the AI-powered application identifies 15 essential skin beauty and health metrics. Another example would be IBM Watson which uses cognitive computing to analyze patient records and oncology literature to help medical experts create personal treatment strategies.
IoT
IoT technologies have been mainstay features in the medical industry for some time. However, as the technology continues to get more refined, more use cases become available for implementation, going beyond simply tracking user vitals. IoT can also be invaluable for remote patient monitoring, inventory management, pharmacy management, and can even provide surgery assistance.
An exciting example would be Boston Scientific’s Vercise Deep Brain Stimulator System, which is engineered for neural targeting to help Parkinson’s disease treatment, along with dystonia, and essential tremor.
Big Data
Big Data is essential for designing scalable apps. Both IoT and AI generate copious amounts of data, so there needs to be a technology implemented that processes all the information. As such, creating datasets that are capable of handling massive calculations in real-time is necessary if you want to reap the benefits of IoT and AI features.
Blockchain
Blockchain’s massive advantage is that it can easily solve interoperability issues. For instance, you have things like Medlbock, that allow clinics to share all patient information safely or permissioned ledgers, ensuring that the sensitive information won’t be tempered with.
Blockchain could help with integrating electronic health record systems, supply chain tracking, and could open opportunities to create decentralized portals for patients where they can control access to their data.
VR and AR
While some may shrug these technologies off as more suited for gaming and social media (like in the cases of Pokemon Go and TikTok), there are several practical uses for both virtual and augmented reality in medicine. For instance, AR can help medical experts train for surgeries in a safe manner, while VR can be used to aid indoor navigation in clinics.
A good example of VR in healthcare would be BTS Bioengineering’s Nirvana, which is an interactive and sensory room for cognitive and motor rehabilitation.
Stellar Healthcare App Examples
We’ve gathered a few examples of excellent healthcare apps that have succeeded in making doctors’ and patients’ lives easier.
HosTalky
HosTalky is a comprehensive resource and communications platform for healthcare experts. HosTalky isn’t just another chat app — it has an entire ecosystem created around it to help healthcare experts take on the daily hurdles of their profession.
Through the app, they can express their ideas, communicate with each other via chat, and coordinate meetings. The app also enables users to send and receive reminders and create personalized notes to prioritize daily tasks and stay organized.
MySugr
MySugr is a patient-oriented app that helps them navigate the challenges of diabetes more easily. The application allows for easy tracking of the patient’s blood sugar, bolus, and carbs — it even tracks estimated HbA1c. Such comprehensive tracking allows doctors to review the data more accurately and provide more effective treatment.
To make things a bit more fun, the app also has several motivational challenges and provides continuous feedback to help people with Type 1 and 2 diabetes get along easier.
BetterHelp
BetterHelp offers an affordable and convenient approach to improving your mental health and getting assistance from a professional, enabling users to connect with licensed mental health counselors and therapists via messaging and video chat.
The app offers a pool of over 3,000 accredited experts, who specialize in dealing with various mental problems.
Final Thoughts on Healthcare Mobile App Development
Developing a healthcare mobile app is a long and complex process that involves a myriad of components and strategies to consider. The tips and strategies listed in this article should equip you with everything you need to create an app that blends cutting-edge technology and seamless user experience, but most importantly — benefits both patients and healthcare professionals.
Healthcare Mobile App Development FAQs
How can you create an outstanding healthcare application?
Prototyping your project before jumping into the actual development cycle can ensure that all vital features of your app will work without flaws and compromise. The prototypes can also be tested by your target audience, ensuring that you only use the most popular features and are not spending additional resources on last-minute overhauls.
How can a health app remain competitive?
Gather user feedback and valuable usage data. The two will help you understand how your target audience interacts with the app and whether they have issues with it. Also, ensure that you release regular updates with every OS update. Lastly, follow the related trends, and add new features if necessary so you don’t fall behind your competitors.
How long will it take to build a healthcare app?
The time it will take to fully develop a working app will vary from project to project. Simpler applications with few features may take only six months, while more complex variants may go over a year. By establishing your app’s must-have features and knowing who your target market is, you can shorten the initial stages of development. Also, effective and thorough prototyping will speed up the actual development process as, hopefully, there will not be any unaccounted setbacks, such as bugs or incompatibility issues.
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