Healthcare App Development — Everything you need to know

Healthcare app development is one of the most surfaced topics of interest for new entrepreneurs and start-ups. Why? The pandemic sabotaged our lives. The seriousness towards health and well-being has become premier. And just like everyone, the tech and business industry also focus on the need of consumers.

“According to data, one in five individuals opts to depend on health & fitness-related gadgets. There is a huge increase in demand post-covid-19. People are more conscious than ever to focus on themselves.”

Apps are the new revenue as well as popularity generating platform and mobile app development is considered a ‘must-have’. Healthcare apps are gaining attention and are in demand. So, let’s learn how to develop a healthcare app. If you are planning your start-up in 2023 then all areas of research, planning, and implementation are important to navigate.

What Is a Healthcare App?

Healthcare applications ensure to make our life easier by tracking our health data, ensuring remote assistance, providing access to doctors around-the-clock, sharing health improvement advice, and more.

It is a service-based platform dedicated to the well-being of patients. A healthcare app is a digitalized platform for simple medical consultations and more.

Types of Healthcare apps

Now it’s important to understand the different types of healthcare apps. It can be categorized based on the consumer such as:

Professional Healthcare Apps for Medical Staff

Professional healthcare apps are primarily for doctors and medical staff. They are used as a mediating tool in communication and treatment processes between the patient and the doctor.

There’s a further segment in professional healthcare apps depending upon the area of service. Such as for reserving appointments — Doctor appointment apps, maintaining records — health recording apps, Health tracking apps, etc.

Professional Healthcare Apps for Providers

There are several uses for a professional healthcare app for providers. Such as tracking the progress of patients without the need for a physical examination. The functionality of the healthcare app can determine the heart rate, respiration rate, blood glucose, etc.

Via the app, the provider reviews and sends patient data to the respective medical fields.

Healthcare Apps for Patients

Healthcare apps dedicated to patients often don’t include doctors, but they offer a varied amount of helpful information for patients. It simplifies the major time-consuming tasks.

Medical education apps, dieting apps, healthy lifestyle apps, reminder apps, and diagnosis apps are a few examples of the different types of healthcare apps for patients.

Once you’re aware of the various domains of healthcare apps. You can figure out which one you’d want to commence your platform with. And then you can start your healthcare app development process.

Factors affecting the cost of the healthcare app:

It’s important to recognize that the cost of developing a healthcare app increases with concept complexity. The technological development of medical software will be expensive if the application concept is complicated.

It takes a long time to build each user interface and conduct A/B testing. The different factors are evaluated for business competitors. These include the challenges in UI & UX, the number of databases used by the software, and more.

Now with a step-by-step guide, we have a breakdown of how to develop a healthcare app:

Research and analysis

It goes without saying that if your healthcare app is not worthwhile, it will be a waste of time. Market research is a necessary component for the creation of healthcare mobile apps. You need to research your market, learn more about your rivals, what benefits they offer, what their strong and weak points are, and figure out how to stand out.

Audience Analyses

The user research phase is crucial in healthcare app development. While developing specialized healthcare applications to assist with conditions including bulimia, anorexia, and mental problems. However, when creating healthcare applications, you should always be prepared to deal with people’s delicate issues. It might be difficult to conduct interviews, focus groups, or surveys. This is because you need to strike a balance between finding the source of the user’s problem and upholding ethics.

You need to identify all of your target audience’s pain points in all to serve the right application.

Choosing your app type

The database, functionality, and purpose of a healthcare app are all determined by its category. You can’t merely request that medical app developers create any app. You must decide on important details as a team, such as the type of software you require; how it will function; and lastly what problems it will ease.

Focusing on the UI and UX

The final component of an app’s success is its design, and the design of a healthcare app should be logical and consistent. Its objective is to smoothly guide the user to the endpoint. The design must be user-friendly, and the better the user experience, the better the results. Additionally, remember to make your app’s cognitive load as low as possible.

HIPAA Compliance

Healthcare is an extremely delicate subject, therefore creating healthcare applications is difficult. It’s crucial to follow certain laws if you’re trying to design a healthcare app.

The idea of HIPAA is to ensure the protection of personal healthcare information for both parties: patients and healthcare providers.

How to make sure that your app follows HIPAA requirements or not? It’s a good question to ask, and here’s a short checklist that will help you.

Things to keep in mind while adopting the HIPAA guidelines

Why is it important to limit access?

Information about users’ health is accessible to certain user roles. The patient’s profile with analysis, progress, diagnosis, etc. is only visible to the treating doctor.

How to ensure data encryption?

Developers must use reliable encryption protocols that duly protect all personal health information. The IT team must collect information in a few copies on different servers. This helps to restore information in case of any crashes or errors and respond to any alerts immediately.

How to find HIPAA-compliant services?

All healthcare mobile app development services must be HIPAA compliant. While working on one of the projects, we used Sendbird chat, which is HIPAA compliant. Though we had to customize it to our needs, so it’s not an ‘on the fly process. Unfortunately, there’s no list with all HIPAA-compliant services. It’s a pity, I know, but here’s the checklist you may use while choosing the service.

There are administrative requirements as well, such as defining responsibilities for individuals and developing policies. If you want to be sure you’re not breaching any rules, you can look up the official instructions. To help you in becoming/maintaining compliance, you can also work with businesses that conduct HIPAA audits.

Building your MVP

Now that you’ve ensured to use secure services and picked the healthcare app type, the next step should be MVP development. While building a healthcare app MVP, you need to mind the fundamental MVP creation rules: build it fast and make it viable.

Before healthcare app MVP development, you need to prioritize the vital features, ensure they solve the problem, and iterate constantly. MVP gives you a competitive advantage. This is because you enter the market faster and start gathering feedback from real users sooner than if you build a full-fledged product right away.

Healthcare App Development Checklist:

It is important to note that creating healthcare mobile applications is largely comparable. The good news is that ready solutions can be used because onboarding, user flow, and functionality are frequently the same.

• Type and Subtype of the healthcare app developed — It is essential to incorporate planning and finalize which service to opt for from the diverse categories available in the medical sphere.
• Platforms categorization for service — It is also important to check the platform we are going to cater on. For instance, whether it’s for mobile or web, etc.
• Set of features to be included — Make sure to include a diverse set of services for patients/ consumers. The more features, the better the app.

Another aspect is that developing a healthcare app MVP might be completely different because there are a variety of types and subtypes of healthcare applications, therefore you must choose the feature set that best fits your app.

The following checklist points above will help you craft a better idea in your app development process.

Conclusion

Healthcare apps can be classified into two categories: professional apps including doctors and patient-focused apps without doctors.

Be prepared for some difficulties with user research and data security if you have an app development plan for the healthcare industry. As you deal with delicate subjects, conducting interviews with potential consumers may be challenging.

Your app must adhere to all regulations and be HIPAA compliant. You run the risk of being fined if you don’t. For both doctors and patients, medical devices significantly simplify the diagnosis and treatment processes. Anyone can learn how to create a health app. Modern analytical technology will take the place of the daily schedule.