Founder’s Guide to Medical App Development: Leaders, Features, Benefits

The worldwide pandemic has kickstarted a trend that was already gaining traction. Healthcare app development has now become so popular that the market of mobile healthcare applications has reached 2.7 billion and is predicted to exceed $300 billion by 2025. On Google Play only, there are more than 53 000 healthcare and medical applications but not all of them enjoy success. We collected the most vital information you should know before you launch the healthcare app development process. Keep reading to learn about the essential steps, principles, and tips that will make your healthcare app development process less bumpy.

Statista repor t on the number of mobile health apps in the Google Play Store 2015-2021 

Continue reading to learn more about:

1. What is the difference between healthcare app development and medical app development?
2. What are the popular types of healthcare mobile apps and their functions?
3. What are the hottest trends in healthcare application development in 2022?
4. What do patients want to see in a mobile healthcare app?
5. What benefits do you get with healthcare app development?
6. How to pick a company for healthcare application development? 

Healthcare app development vs medical app development

First, let’s figure out whether you need healthcare app development or medical app development. The purpose of the healthcare app is crucial as it influences the healthcare app development process and strategy.

And while there's a wide variety of healthcare apps, they can be roughly divided into two categories – the ones used by people with no medical background and those developed specifically for medical facilities and doctors working in them. Here's an analysis of the most popular healthcare apps and their functionality. 

1. Medical mobile app development for patients

These apps are the apps that provide useful information and don’t require doctor’s involvement. You may find fitness, meditation and other apps that serve educational purposes. The brightest examples are reminder, dieting, lifestyle, and medical education apps.

If you’re looking for inspiration, here is a list of trending healthcare apps for patients that may help you explain to your healthcare app development team, what you really want:

• Apple Health
• BetterMe
• Medisafe Pill Minder
• Medical ID
• MyFitnessPal

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2. Healthcare application development for doctors 

These are the apps that serve as communication mediators between the doctors and patients such as EHR , PMS, LIMS, and HMS. As a rule, professional healthcare apps have a set of features that facilitate the treatment process.

These are the apps that enable doctors to set appointments with patients, organize video conferencing, track patients’ health, create and maintain databases with electronic medical/health records. Take a look at a list of healthcare apps for doctors that may help you find the features your product should have:

• Medscape
• Prevention
• TaskForce
• PEPID
• VisualDx
• Skyscape Medical Library

Types of healthcare mobile apps and their functions

1. Doctor-patient communication mHealth apps

This category includes solutions like EHR, HMS, mobile and many other healthcare apps for medical staff . These are some of the most complex and value-generating mHealth apps as they enable simple communication between hospitals, third party administrators, and patients. They significantly reduce the time spent on running manual operations and can have a very robust set of features.

Another important factor to consider before you begin the healthcare app development process is HIPAA compliance. Read how to become HIPAA compliant in our whitepaper.

So what functions should you consider before launching medical app development for doctor-patient communication apps? Typically, the on-demand mobile apps of this type have the following features:

• built-in messaging
• video/audio conferencing
• virtual waiting rooms
• history of prescriptions and drugs
• EHR
• sharing of health reports

2. Fitness apps

Home workout apps have become a handy way to exercise in home and keep fit during the lockdown. The revenue of fitness apps in 2020 increased by 84% and the numbers are only growing. Nowadays, you can see versatile self-training, dieting, and supervised-training apps that allow people more flexibility as compared to the gym-based training sessions. The most trending fitness app features you should include in your healthcare app development plan are:

• customized workout plans
• tracking of success
• integration with smartwatches and health trackers
• quick and effective training from influencers and stars
• virtual group training sessions
• guidance of professional trainers

3. Telepharmacy apps

These are the applications that control the drug dispensing and help doctors prescribe the right doses of medicines based on their personal information such as patient's age, weight, condition, and progress. In a nutshell, these solutions automate and increase precision in medical dosing and help doctors save time on manual calculations. 

What are the top features of telepharmacy and drug dispensing apps? Include these functions into your healthcare app development process:

• manage patient's medicine dosing
• EHR for sharing up-to-date health data with caregivers and medical staff
• conduct preventative interventions
• proactively prescribe medications
• track the flow and history of illnesses and keep all treatment records
• set reminders for taking medications with names and dosage

4. Risk assessment apps

Healthcare app development for risk assessment helps read the up-to-date health performance data and avert high-risk situations. predicts integration between EHR and patient's healthcare monitoring devices. Traditionally, risk assessment apps are popular among midwives, obstetricians, and nurses who track health performance via electronic fetal monitoring for women in labor. Some of useful features for healthcare app development are:

• Automated notification of doctors 
• Integration between reading devices and mobile web apps
• Real-time data on mother's and fetus' health conditions

5. Diet apps

Diet and nutrition apps are among the most demanded healthcare app development clients. Both simple and more complicated diet apps address one of the main death-rate factors -- obesity and obesity-induced diseases. Millions of people around the world are looking for more healthy ways to eat. The more usual suite of diet app includes the following functions:

• simple and fast food logging for calorie intake
• robust library of restaurants, recipes, grocery stores, and ethnic foods
• barcode scanners for simple calorie count
• simple meal planner
• progress tracker
• shopping list constructor

6. Lifestyle apps

Busy lifestyle and growing level of stress creates a strong demand for lifestyle apps. These solutions minister a holistic approach to leaving a healthy and balanced lifestyle. Users who want to make quality changes in their day-to-day life receive advice on mental and physical well-being via handy mobile apps. These pieces of advice can be related to training, exercising, meditation, and diet. The list of possible features you may fancy adding to your healthcare app development process goes like this:

• integration with social media channels
• library of meditation sessions
• progress tracking
• daily advice on nutrition and dieting
• connection with wearables
• reminders and notifications for creating healthy habits
• setting goals
• connecting users with coaches and dieticians

7. Apps for disease monitoring and controlling 

This cohort of healthcare apps has gained world-wide recognition and fast adoption with the spread of Covid-19. While the most recent ones are created for reduction of Covid-19-positive people around the world, there are many other disease monitoring apps for people with diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, and other ailments. The following features may become a part of your healthcare app development process:

• tracking seizures and adding specific data
• video conferencing with doctors
• measuring heart rate and sugar level measuring
• scheduling, dosing, and tracking intake of medications
• notify about doctor appointment
• schedule appointment with specialists
• making reports on patient's health
• real-time chats
• enabling professional's guidance via app

Trends in healthcare application development in 2022

The Covid-19 pandemic significantly influenced people’s behavior: nowadays, more users want to manage and improve their health conditions via mobile applications. Adoption of mobile phones is also seen among the medical staff. According to Zebra, in 2022, around 97% of bedside nurses, 98% of physicians, and 96% of pharmacists are using mobile phones in day-to-day work.

This trend has been widely supported by businesses that provide digital therapy services including live digital therapy sessions with therapists, chats and texts with therapists, cognitive behavioral therapy, and many other services.

On the other side, we already see wide adoption of chatbots , ML, AI, VR, blockchain, big data technologies in medical app development initiatives of healthtech companies. By implementing these technologies, healthcare providers can get better insights into health data, run them through ML and AI and elicit extremely precise outcomes and serve as a base for improved diagnostics, treatment variability, and, in effect, better patient outcomes. 

1. Interoperability

In 2022, more than 60% of healthcare service companies that are setting up the development of digital products are planning to increase their budgets on digitalization according to the 2021 Healthcare Digital Transformation Survey by BDO. 

Source

People expect to interact with health providers through their mobile phones and web apps. In a nutshell, they want to receive the same omnichannel experience using healthcare solutions as in other service industries. That's why interoperability has become one of the most discussed topics among the healthtech leaders.

Interoperability enables a flawless and secure data exchange between the healthcare service providers and third-party administrators like laboratories or logistic companies. And what's the best way to reach interoperability? It's building HIPAA-compliant healthcare solutions.

2. Telemedicine

Telemedicine market is predicted to reach a value of $186.5 billion before 2026. The pandemic has changed the way patients interact with their doctors: people minimize face-to-face visits when possible. More than 71% of patients considered telemedicine as an alternative to face-to-face appointments in 2021. In 2022, seeing your doctor online is just as usual as joining any other online event.

Telemedicine creates great business value and helps healthcare providers to connect with clients from remote areas. Also, with telemedicine, doctors can easily track and communicate the state of health of people with chronic diseases.

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3. Healthtech is becoming consumer-centric

In the past, solutions were built to meet the needs of the healthcare providers and clinics while these days we see a more customer-centric approach to healthcare app development.

Patient experience plays a crucial role in building customer loyalty to a particular provider. This explains why clients stay with providers that deliver additional value through excellent user experience. In 2022 and on, we will be seeing more products oriented towards consumers’ needs.

4. Connected healthcare

As we now know, telemedicine helps healthcare service providers to reach out to people in remote areas. Some telemedicine platforms already have a connection with wearables like smartwatches, blood pressure monitors, and biosensors. They help healthcare providers to track vital health measurements and change treatment accordingly.

As of now, doctors can read data from individual pacemakers, electrocardiographs, sugar level sensors, and many other devices. Another big benefit of connected healthcare is that doctors have access to real-time readings which enables them to interpret and correlate these results. 

5. Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Healthtech businesses are steadily incorporating AI and ML technologies in their healthcare solutions. With large databases of health data, healthcare providers can deliver better outcomes. ML-based algorithms run through the database elicit valuable insight in the effectiveness of treatment and provide medical staff in diagnosing terminal diseases at an early age.

Another popular way of applying AI in health apps is by building AI-based chatbots. Gartner says that by 2022, 70% of all online communication between businesses and clients will be in one or another way aided with an AI-based chatbot.

Millennials are more prone to address chatbots rather than calling. For businesses, it means that they can minimize the time spent on responding to client's queries and spend more time running crucial processes. 

What do patients want to see in a mobile healthcare app?

The most basic functions that patients want to see in mobile health apps are scheduling an appointment, access to medical records, and ability to request prescriptions. Yet, not many businesses include all three of them in their healthcare app development plans.

Only 11% of the hospital apps have at least one of the mentioned functions which brings them a 2% rise in engagement of their patients. From these numbers, we see a great potential for improvement for healthcare apps. And the best chance for healthcare providers to engage patients is to develop a health mobile app with a set of features they really need and expect to see.

1. Easy access to functionalities

It's always good to have special features in your application, yet, the first thing you should take care of is easy access to functionalities. People quickly shift from one app to another which means that your healthcare app should enable them to do the basic actions as fast as possible. Roughly speaking, people aren't ready to spend time on slow and complicated apps.

“Users drop apps that take time to learn how to navigate because mobile health apps are meant to significantly reduce time and effort, instead of adding more.”

So while you have launched your healthcare app development process, make sure that you prioritize simplicity and user-friendliness. Nowadays, people really expect to use apps that save time on canceling, changing, and booking doctor's appointments via their mobile telephone. 

2. Actionable information

Now that we know that users expect to elicit maximum usefulness from each app, we can also say that they expect to receive detailed and actionable data from healthcare providers via mobile apps.

What kind of information should healthcare providers share with their clients? Is it better to create a library and let users browse by themselves or should your healthcare app development team craft a more specific algorithm for content journey?

“In reality, patients want to learn about their own conditions and expect the apps to guide them through their educational process.”

Traditionally, people want to know all possible details beginning with the description of condition and ending with causes. Also, they want to know what opportunities of treatment they can take. Relevance of content increases user engagement so make sure that your healthcare app development team creates a simple way for self-education.

3. Direct connection with experts

Around 75% of doctor appointments are quite basic and could be conducted via video or a phone call. This means that both patients and doctors can significantly decrease the time they spend commuting, waiting, and communicating by simply converting via an app.

In an interview for Health, Mary Oseid – senior vice president of regional strategy and operations of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health says "What we saw during COVID was a real shift from the in-person visit to the phone visit and video visit with patients". Indeed, telehealth services have done just that: they saved time people spent on making appointments and allowed doctors to deliver more personalized services.

4. Space for patient community

People who use healthcare apps for fitness or health improvement tend to participate in communities.

“Research by Journal of Medical Internet shows that 56% out of 217 users felt support from other members to continue leading healthy routines.”

That's exactly why it's crucial for your healthcare app to provide a community feature. People find support and comfort in communicating with other people that share the same illness or condition. Social communities in healthcare apps also help people with certain diagnosed conditions and illnesses access specific data.

5. Integration with wearables

By 2023, the wearables market is predicted to reach $20 billion according to Juniper research. This means that the demand for integration of apps and wearables will be growing in the following years. So while launching healthcare app development, take into account that many potential users will want to connect their smartwatches with your mobile healthcare app.

Integration with wearables allows people to track and share their activities with doctors and see a direct impact of physical activity on their health. This includes various trackers and smartwatches that can gather information about heart rate, tremors, blood sugar, sleep patterns, posture control, and physical activity.

What benefits do you get with healthcare app development?

The demand for healthcare app development is expected to grow by 5% between 2019-2023, according to the Deloitte Global Healthcare Outlook report. The Covid-19 has given an explosive rise in healthcare app development. Let's analyze what benefits healthcare app development brings to clinics, doctors, and patients.

1. Benefits for healthcare organizations

Healthcare software development increases precision and reduces the number of man-made mistakes in routine tasks. Since the overall performance of healthcare organizations is tightly connected to timely accomplishment of simple processes, healthcare can greatly benefit from:

• flawless data collection, storage, and management
• automated payments
• improved medical business management
• higher patient satisfaction rates
• increased financial efficiency
• great cost optimization

2. Benefits for doctors

Healthcare app development has a huge capacity for optimization on mundane tasks thus allowing doctors to deliver more value to patients. Here is a short list of what medical app development can do for doctors.

• diminish excessive paperwork
• provide more time for primary health care and treatment
• reduce workload by automating patient registration, record maintenance, and data storage
• help doctors collaborate with peers and other specialists
• provide value-driven medical care
• share knowledge with other experts without boundaries
• efficiently manage all patient data with EMR, PES, and EHR

3. Benefits for patients

For patients, medical app development brings a variety of benefits that massively save up their time, improves communication, and positively impacts the results of treatment. There are yet, many more benefits for patients including:

• patients can communicate with doctors via chats and video and audio conferencing
• improved quality of treatment enabled with knowledge sharing between doctors
• instant calling and scheduling appointment
• easy access to patient's data from any clinic

Medical app development requires involvement of many costly resources and profound tech expertise that's gained over a long time. Hiring a tech agency with experience in medical app development is a great shortcut to success. Large businesses, enterprises, and startups alike delegate their healthcare app development activities to tech companies. Here are a couple of hints that can help you land with a perfectly matching healthcare app development agency.

1. Work with agencies that have profound experience in medical app development. Companies that already have a robust portfolio of healthcare apps have tech talents with profound knowledge of the industry regulations. For instance, companies like Binariks have built FHIR and HIPAA-compliant applications that allow healthcare service providers and third-party administrators to exchange data safely and seamlessly. 

2. Check the certificates that guarantee that the company follows international security standards. Companies that have ISO certificates follow strict security measures that concern both virtual and physical protection of data and those who are healthcare app development specialists who operate that data. Also, pay attention to companies that can offer expertise of a business analyst who will help you map out a unique and HIPAA-compliant healthcare solution that will win the competition.

3. Find a company that offers flexible models of collaboration. Medical app development process takes time and so does its maintenance. Make sure that your tech partner can adjust the size of the healthcare app development team according to your ongoing needs. Check if they operate on markets with large tech talent pools and can hire top talents in short notice.

4. Prioritize expertise of programmers over healthcare app development cost. There's a big difference in hourly rates of programmers in different areas of the world but investing in experienced programmers is a winning strategy in the long run. Programmers with higher-than-average rates have a good working knowledge, best practice, practical skills that won't require fixing later.

Final thoughts

In the next few years, we will be seeing a growing demand for medical app development including iOS healthcare app development and healthcare android app development. Clinics, healthcare service providers, and third-party administrators alike will be addressing healthcare application development due to the pressing necessity of complying with the HIPAA standard. 

Drop us a line in the “contact us ” section if you are looking for a reliable and experienced medical mobile app development agency. Our skilled team of programmers with years of experience in app development for healthcare businesses will help you to bring your idea into reality.