On-Demand Appointment Booking App: Everything You Need To Know

Looking for a fresh start in the healthcare sector with a powerful solution? Develop an on-demand appointment booking app for clinics, hospitals and individual doctors to schedule appointments and operations.

Image Source: Dribble By Zainik Lab

Is managing appointments at your clinic has become a little stressful? Does your clinical staff taking long hours in scheduling appointments and streamlining the operations of the clinic? In that case, developing an on-demand appointment booking app is the perfect way to manage your clinical appointments without chasing with manual records.

In this technology-driven era, people with different psychologies would prefer to book their appointment prior to visiting the place whether it be a doctor, salon or bar to save time and money.

All thanks to the advanced technologies and innovative on-demand appointment booking applications that have made this possible and put an end to all this discomfort associated with the old tired traditional healthcare approaches.

“Care is shifting from the hospital to the clinic, from the clinic to the home and from the home to a 24*7 healthcare support with the ubiquitous access to care, driven by the mobile phone.”

- According to the healthcare expert- Sangita Reddy

Whether your an owner of the hospital or a doctor with a personal clinic, streamlining appointments and other clinical operations become far easier and hassle-free with an on-demand scheduling app. In fact, modern healthcare technologies are quickly overtaking the traditional healthcare approach and providing better ways for patients to instantly get connected with the healthcare service providers. An on-demand appointment booking app brings all stakeholders including doctors, patients, and other health technicians to the same platform.

With the projection that mhealthcare market size is expected to grow to $370 billion by 2022 from $160 billion in 2018, it is high time to take a quick movement to the technology-driven solutions that help you gain better success.

If you are a little stressed about where to start your journey and how to be a part of this thriving industry, then don’t worry! Our blog has answered all your W’s and H’s and guides you a step-by-step overall scenario.

Key highlights of the blog:

• Alerting Challenges Associated With the Traditional Healthcare Methods
• Catching the mHealthcare Market Stats to Explain Why It is Necessary to Build Appointment Scheduling app?
• Perks Of Developing an On-demand Appointment Booking App
• Revenue Streams for Your Doctor Booking App
• Salient Features of Developing Your Doctor Booking App
• How Much Does It Cost You To Create an App For Appointment Booking?
• Success Formula Of Developing an Appoint Booking
• Conclusion: Want to Build a Doctor Appointment App

Let’s dig deep into each point for better understanding…

1. Alerting Challenges Associated With the Traditional Healthcare Methods

No matter whether you are a practitioner of your field or a doctor with a decade of experience, you must be familiar with the changing wave of the healthcare industry and how mhealth solutions are taking over traditional healthcare approaches.

Apart here are the few challenges of the traditional healthcare approach that risen the demand for on-demand appointment booking solution in 2022:

• Manual Appointment Arrangement With Excel Sheets

With the availability of CRM software solutions in healthcare spaces, does it really make any sense to manage and hold patient data manually with excel sheets? The biggest challenges of storing the huge pool of data with pen and paper actually leave the chance of human errors in your record. And one mistake in your records can lead to a serious blunder. But, by hiring a mobile app development company in Dubai, you can easily avail of a CRM system for your clinic or hospital.

• Least Data Security

What if the patient’s record file has been misplaced from the hospital? Is your hospital has a backup of that data? What system do you have to retrieve that data? With the cloud-based integration, you can permanently store the data on cloud space from where you can easily access that details from anywhere, anytime. In that case, at least your administrative staff doesn’t have to spend half of their day calling patients for their records.

• Highly Cost To Maintain CRM Support

Undoubtedly, CRM solutions add great support to your clinic and streamline such things, but technical support with some CRM solutions comes at a higher cost.

So what is the solution to deal with this situation? The simple potent way to manage clinical appointments with the doctor is to invest in the on-demand appointment booking app.

You don’t need to rely on our empty words. Let’s catch up on some statistics that enable you to understand the right scenario.

2. Catching the mHealthcare Market Stats to Explain Why It is Necessary to Build Appointment Scheduling app?

With the emerging technologies and innovations, the digital health market has recorded tremendous growth and its projecting figures are portraying the rising graph for the healthcare startups and leading brands.

So here are a few stats that you need to know:

• mHealth Market size was valued at over USD 30.2 billion in 2018 that is expected to grow at 38.5% CAGR from 2019 to 2025.
• With the growing smartphone penetration in the US, from 28% of Americans using smartphones, the number has jumped to 36% for millennials in 2018 and anticipated to grow with each passing year.
• As per the recent data, more than 325,000 mhealth apps are available for Apple and Android smartphones and these numbers keep climbing each year.
• According to the statista, the estimated global mobile healthcare market is expected to make $189 billion in 2025.

With all these statistics, you must have understood that technology is boldly paving its way to the healthcare industry. But that isn’t all that push you to the final decision of making an on-demand booking app.

3. Perks Of Developing an On-demand Appointment Booking App

Many of you are wondering why patients need an app for booking an appointment with the doctor? The simple reason is, nobody likes to wait for hours at the clinic or hospital especially during this pandemic time. But that isn’t all that really matters.

Here are some common benefits of investing in a Doctor’s appointment booking app:

• Provides 24*7 convenience to the patients
• Reduces the possibility of facing unavailability of doctor
• Allows appointment booking anytime and from anywhere
• Ensuring hassle-free yet better management of appointments
• Streamline operations, save money and time
• Saves administrative tasks by automating the appointment scheduling process
• Eliminates the chances of having human errors in handling patient’s record
• Direct online payment confirmation and ease of communication

To get started with an appointment booking app it is worth hiring an app development company in UAE that understands your requirements and able to create a solution that perfectly fits your changing needs and enables you to meet the end needs of the users.

But before that let’s understand the benefits of appointment booking app for clinics as well patients perspective:

• Perks of investing in Appointment booking app from the perspective of Clinics and Hospital

With an appointment booking app, doctors can ensure reliable management by seamlessly handling appointments. The app has features like displaying closed appointments and no-shows, complete the appointment history record of the patients, thus, improving proficiency by eliminating the scope of human errors. The small investment in appointment app development can save valuable time on administrative tasks.

• Perks of Developing Appointment Booking App From The Perspective of Patients

The biggest advantage of accessing the online appointment booking app is it allows you to book an appointment anytime and from anywhere with easy access to doctors. In addition, the appointment feature will add a great level of comfort to elderly patients or those who are suffering from life-long illness.

• Estimated Cost of eConsultation is Less Than In-Person Visit

According to the UnitedHealthcare reports, an estimated online consultation cost is approx $50 as compared to $150 for an urgent care facility that is itself half of the cost of visiting a doctor in person.

4. Revenue Streams for Your Doctor Booking App

So we are assuming that you have understood the benefits of investing in an appointment booking app but what after that? There is no use in developing an app that doesn’t make you any money…Sounds relatable?

So let’s check out the potential revenue models for the doctor booking app:

• Paid Listing

The paid listing feature works with the specific filters that can be used in a doctor appointment booking app. Let’s say, a patient can perform a search to find doctors related to specific medical problems, treatment types, problematic body parts or any other treatments, they will start noticing the relatable results.

To appear in the related results, the doctors pay to get listed on the search result page. While there are multiple ways to implement, it is recommended to hire a mobile app developer in Dubai to clearly elaborate the use of this feature in a simple and general way.

• Advertising

This is one of the traditional ways to monetize your mobile app. A doctor can advertise on a specific web page at certain places. Generally, the homepage of the app is used as a commonplace for advertisement. Ideally, the header or middle section of the app has been used for the advertisement banner. Rest, the advertisement charges are depending upon the pay-per-click charges and the placement of advertisements.

• General Commission-Based Model

In a doctor appointment booking app, the admin has an option to earn money by charging a commission fee on each booking. Also, the commission fees will be charged in the form of service fees from the respective doctor. However to make your commission-based doctor booking appointment run seamlessly, make sure you get your app developed from the reputed software development company in Dubai.

Nevertheless, the monetizing strategy is all depending upon the feature you integrate into your on-demand patient booking app. So let’s check out what features you should include in your app to make it functional…

5. Salient Features of Developing Your Doctor Booking App

There are several features that will determine the success of your app. But, before you dive directly into the set of features, it is important to understand that doctor appointment booking app work in three ways:

• A platform that easily organizes appointments, tracks past medical records or provides online prescriptions.
• A perfect premium listing method according to doctors, clinics or hospitals have to pay for the listing price to stay on the top of the search list.
• A platform for doctors and clinics for holding patients data and give reminders and messages to the patient.

So here are the features for the Doctor panel, patient and admin panel:

In a Nutshell: While developing an on-demand appointment booking app for your clinic or patients, keep in mind that these are the few basic features that add functionality. To stand first in the competition, you need to hire a cross-platform app development company that can integrate advanced features and some uniqueness to your app.

The average cost to develop this app can’t be starting from $15,000 to $20,000+ and can go beyond that also. But one thing that remains important among all, is the UI design of the functionality. To build an app with these features you need both knowledges of UI, tools and technologies that can improve the user experience.

6. How Much Does It Cost You To Create an App For Appointment Booking?

There are many app development experts that may ask you to develop your on-demand appointment booking application at $5000. But how far this statement is true to believe?

Well, considering various studies and market research surveys, it is estimated that the average cost to develop an app is ranging from $37,000 to $74,000+. If you noticed that even experts are not able to tell you the exact development cost. Reason being…

Like other on-demand applications, appointment booking apps also demand major factors like app complexity, development duration, platform, technology stack, features, functionalities, development team, the hourly rate of developers and more.

You must be clueless about how all these factors are interrelated. If yes, then let’s understand how?

The features and functionalities you choose to integrate into your application will decide the complexity of the application and that is directly in relation to the development duration. Further, the hourly rate of the developer is calculated with the number of hours it takes to build an application. In other words, the higher the development time is, the higher the development cost will be. To save a great amount on the budget, it is worth hiring software developers from countries like India where the hourly rate is starting from $15 to $50+.

In addition, platform choice is also a cost-determining factor. Developing a native Android or iOS app is an expensive approach than developing a cross-platform application. Not only does it take a long time to develop but also involves rigorous testing. On the other hand, cross-platform app development helps you get the app developed in a short time.

As per the expert estimation, the frontend development cost of the app for each platform takes around 150–200 hours, UI designing takes 130–150 hour, and the backend development will take around 180- 200 hours. Altogether, an on-demand appointment booking app will take approx 550 to 600 hours and if it is calculated with the $15 hourly cost of the developer, then your app development cost will be approx $15000+.

7. Success Formula Of Developing an Appoint Booking

Despite knowing everything, there is something missing that commit you the success of your app. So here we reveal to you the success formula of developing the doctor appointment booking app:

• While developing an application, one of the biggest challenges is to retain the user-base! By offering rewards, discounts, promos, loyalty offers and other benefits, you can keep your customer engaged with your app longer.
• Make sure you focus on building a dependable network of doctors and verify their authentication. You can add a license, certificates, and other vital documents of the doctor.
• To make sure that your app runs smoothly and adds profit to your business, it is important to choose the best revenue model for your doctor’s appointment booking app. Therefore, carefully select your app monetizing model to ensure long-term benefit to your business.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, technology has taken over the world and the healthcare sector is not left as an exception. And doctor appointment booking apps have become an urgent need of the time where millions of people’s lives are at stake due to Covid-19. Being the healthcare heroes and official healthcare partners, it becomes your responsibility to cater better care to the patients.

So with the emergence of telemedicine and mobile healthcare, now doctors can provide virtual assistance even to the rural areas. Hopefully, this blog has explained all the major parameters of developing on-demand appointment booking apps.

Still, if you have any doubts or need to understand how technology is supporting this concept and what would be the real estimation of app development, then it is worth hiring a mobile app development company in Dubai. They will evaluate your app idea and enable you to get started with the perfect solution.