How to Count the Cost of Telemedicine App Development?

COVID-19 has created a huge demand for telemedicine app development. Experts are predicting a dramatic rise of the telemedicine market: from .9 billion in 2019 to $194.1 billion in 2023, and reaching a high mark of $459.8 in 2030 according to predictions. And even though there already are such renowned telemedicine app development solutions as Sesame Care, PlushCare, and Teladoc, there is a huge potential for custom telehealth app development. Keep reading and learn how to count the approximate cost of telemedicine app development and get a better grasp of the telehealth app development process.

How to count the cost of telemedicine app development?

The cost of the telemedicine app development process includes a couple of factors that have many variations which means that you can only know a precise final cost of telehealth app development only after consulting a telemedicine app development company. And for a better understanding of the cost structure of a final product, you should take into consideration the following factors:

1. Team setup during every stage of the telemedicine app development process
2. Telehealth app development team setup
3. Hourly rates of the telemedicine app developers
4. Approximate tech stack for creating telemedicine app development solutions

The final cost of telemedicine app development can get higher if you decide to implement a large number of features, integrate your system with multiple third-party platforms, add synchronization with health performance trackers, or do anything out-of-ordinary.

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The major hidden expenses you can expect during telehealth app development journey are:

1. Adding video conferencing and chat functions
2. Integration of new features and medical devices
3. Training your employees
4. Purchasing telehealth platform license
5. Hiring lawyers
6. Adding customer support service

But worry not, there is a safe and market-tested approach to building telemedicine app development solutions that have the right set of functionality and meet your budget.

Team setup during every stage of the telemedicine app development process

Just like there are (hopefully) no two identical telemedicine app development solutions, there are no two identical product development processes. The number of tech experts and their involvement in the process will vary but they will, highly likely, follow a more time-tried telemedicine app development process. 

1. Discovery phase

While hiring a telemedicine app development company, be sure to include the discovery phase into your telemedicine mobile app development process. The discovery phase is essential for both startups and mature tech companies with their own software solutions.

This initial phase is necessary for many reasons: understand your needs, prepare research on competitors, map out the scope of work, choose tech stack, set a scalable architecture to name a few.

During discovery, the outsourcing company gathers a cross-functional team of experts that can include:

• Product owner
• Project manager
• Business analyst
• Solution architect
• UI/UX designers
• Telemedicine app developers
• Quality assurance specialists

In the best case scenario, the entire development team discovery phase also includes representative end users.

2. MVP telehealth app development

Creating minimal viable product versions of telemedicine app development solutions is traditionally a prerogative of tech startups, however, mature businesses can also use it for testing of new functionality.

MVP development follows the discovery phase when you decide what most critical product features shall be included in the following iterations of your product. 

During MVP development, companies usually provide following things:

1. Software architecture
2. Complete version of design with all features
3. An app that can get tested
4. Product documentation

During this early stage of development, you can test and change functionality in a way that will yield more value and revenue in the future.

Since MVP development is a short-term (around 1-2 month) but labor-intensive phase, your telemedicine mobile app development team may have various configurations and include:

1. Product owner
2. Project manager
3. Solution architect
4. DevOps engineer
5. UI/UX designers
6. Telemedicine app developers
7. Quality assurance specialists

3. Ongoing development process

Active solution development can last months or years, depending on the type of solution you want to build. The logic is simple: the more complex and advanced telemedicine app you want to build, the more human-hours you’ll have to cover.

Who can take part in your team during ongoing telemedicine app development? Here’s a short list of experts:

1. Product owner
2. Project manager
3. Solution architect
4. DevOps engineer
5. UI/UX designers
6. Telemedicine app developers
7. Quality assurance specialists

During the ongoing development phase, you can expect your team to grow smaller and bigger when necessary. Experienced tech companies transparently communicate the number and expertise level of telemedicine app developers throughout every phase of the process.

4. Support

The least active phase of software development requires a low involvement of tech specialists and is usually limited to engagement of a couple of programmers, DevOps specialists, and managers. The team would include a short list of specialists:

1. Project manager
2. DevOps engineer
3. Telemedicine app developers

The ultimate goal of the support and maintenance phase is to implement minimal changes and ensure stable performance of the product.

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Hourly rates of the telemedicine app developers

So how do we count the cost of telemedicine app development? The formula is quite simple: we multiply developers rate by approximate time taken for developing a core feature.

Another important factor that influences the total cost of telemedicine app development is where your telemedicine app developers are located. For instance, the development budget in the US will be considerably higher than in Eastern Europe but the quality of work will be the same. 

According to Mind Bowser, the most basic app consisting of a doctor app, patient app, and an admin panel will cost from $50,000 to $80,000. The MVP telemedicine app development can cost around $15,000 depending on a set of features. A feature-reach telemedicine app development and solution cost can cost around $150,000 – $250,000.

So if your company is located in Western Europe or North America, you can significantly decrease the cost of telemedicine app development through delegating development to a tech company in Eastern Europe, South America, or Asia.

Just to compare, an average hourly rate of a senior developer in the US ranges between $150-$250, in the UK it is around $80-$150, and in Ukraine it ranges between $35-50.

Coming back to our formula, the cost equals developer rate multiplied by time of feature implementation. Some tech skills are more popular and some are less widely known which, again, influences the development cost.

For instance, implementation of IoT, big data, cloud computing, and other high-tech will influence the final cost but will also bring great benefits to your business.

Approximate tech stack for creating telemedicine app development solutions

There are very many different types of telemedicine solutions with unimaginably versatile functions. And we are aware of the fact that we need to use a wide toolset to build well-functioning solutions. That’s why we don’t have a one-and-only technology for telemedicine app development.

We can roughly divide all telemedicine apps and solutions into seven categories according to their purpose: doctor-patient communication mHealth apps, apps for disease monitoring and controlling, risk assessment, fitness, diet, and lifestyle.

Since we cannot list all technologies, languages, frameworks, storages, and third-party tools used in all telemedicine app development solutions, we will list those used most frequently.

• In telemedicine mobile app development, we see a lot of Swift and Kotlin/Java as well as Python/Ruby/Java for the background.
• APIs used for telemedicine development are SendGrid, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Stripe, EC2, and S3.
• Videoconferencing is implemented with Twilio, RTMP, and WebRTC.

• React Native/Flutter are commonly used for development of cross-platform apps.
• MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres, Cassandra, and Hbase are the most frequently applied databases.
• Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are the most popular cloud environments for telemedicine app development.
•  Chats are built with Twilio and Socket.io.

Final thoughts

In this article, we listed some important and big factors that should be taken into account while counting telemedicine app development cost. There are, nonetheless, more small things that you should keep in mind. You may encounter additional expenses on in-house employment, versatile employer benefits, and employer taxes while extending your in-house team.

These and other additional expenses add up to the overall cost of telemedicine app development. Outsourcing of your telemedicine app development to other countries with lower developer rates may be a great alternative. And if you feel like you don’t know how to build a remote team of developers, please, leave us a message and we will come back to you shortly.