Building health applications is the newest technology in the medical field. With daily innovations around the globe, the health industry has not been left behind in improving the patient-doctor relationship.
The app is all-rounded as it allows patients to book appointments without waiting for long hours in the hallway, lab technicians to share medical test results, helps chemist attendants issue prescriptions with ease, and allows administrators and nurses to read your information and guide you accordingly. Besides, it's easy to create and manage from your mobile phone.
Therefore if you're a startup or an existing entrepreneur in the medical field and plan to create a health app, this guide will take you step by step mental health app development from Scratch.
What is the Difference between a Health App and a Medical App?
A Health App is an application compatible with mobile devices that assists users like doctors and patients to keep track of health updates and overall well being. Their major development goal is to help solve health challenges and increase value to the public users.
On the other hand, a Medical App is a mobile phone software that functions as part of a regulated medical device and is used by medical professionals only.
Key Features in a Health Application
In today's living, a healthy lifestyle is vital! And to be among the market leaders, you need to stay updated with the trending innovation. To achieve mileage in an ever-growing industry, you need to create an app with friendly features for easier navigation yet beneficial to users.
Therefore, since your main goal is to simplify things for doctors and patients, below are the key features you should include in your health application.
⦁ User profile
⦁ Video Conferencing
⦁ Booking option
⦁ Online prescription
⦁ Shared progress and communication
⦁ Integrate with medical devices
8 Stages to Develop Health Apps
When creating a successful health app, the main goal is to make life easier for the users. Below are the stages you should follow:
Decide What Type of E-Health App You're Going to Build
There are different available medical solutions today, although they revolve around doctors, patients, and hospital administration. Moving forward, you need to know the type of health app that you are going to build.
However, to create a successful health application, you'll need to learn from the existing ones to overview their unique features. Below are the available health apps that you can create for your target audience.
For Patients
⦁ Appointment and booking
⦁ Weight loss app
⦁ Symptoms control and self-diagnosis
⦁ Alerts and reminders
⦁ Chronic disease control
⦁ Remote communication with the doctor
⦁ Fitness and body wellness app
For Doctors
⦁ Medical calculators
⦁ Clinical communication
⦁ Prescription and diagnosis
⦁ Medicine references
⦁ Appointment scheduling and management
⦁ Online training and consultation with colleagues
⦁ Remote patient monitoring
Medical Administration Staff
⦁ Billing
⦁ Filing
⦁ Inventory control and management
⦁ Medical professional meet up point
⦁ Practice management application
These applications have one intention; to simplify user work while optimizing their services.
Market Research and Customer Feedback
Market research is important before deciding which application you'll build. It helps you gain knowledge on what is missing in the market and the customer preferences.
This research can be a simple online survey or a physical visit to your intended audience. However, you can also combine the two methods to get a wider picture of what the market needs.
While customer feedback is important to an existing business, it also plays a crucial role when introducing a new app in the market. Here you realize whether your target audience is familiar with health applications and their interest areas.
Define your Target Audience Needs
Mobile applications in the health industry have increased, and therefore for you to stand out in your niche, you need to create a health app that resonates with your target audience. The above research will help you ride easy on identifying your target audience.
To build a beneficial app, you need to identify the problem and offer a solution through the same application. Your audience will also dictate the type of features you can install in the app for easy usage. For example, an app that targets women's health and fitness should only revolve around relevant issues and how to overcome them.
Do Your Privacy and Compliance Research
HIPAA compliance is the commonly used data protection for patient health information. However, depending on the type of application you're building, you may consider other concepts like;
⦁ MFi program
⦁ Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for CareKit and Health Kit
⦁ Android. Os. health documentation
⦁ IEC 62304, ISO27001, SOC2 Type 2, and other standards related to health information
⦁ HITECH Act, GDPR, and other regulations.
Decide Which Platforms and Devices to Support
The most common type of mobile operating system is Android and iOS. Regardless of the health mobile application you create for your target audience, ensure it's compatible with either of the two systems.
Creating a successful application compatible with mobile devices runs down to the information you got about your target audience. You can opt for native development, which means being specific on a particular platform, or mobile cross-development for both systems—ie OSs.
How do Security, APIs, and Agile Bend in a Medical App?
Medical information is quite sensitive and requires privacy when handled and shared from one platform to another. Before building your app, you should consider some compatibility features in the mobile devices you are targeting and other platforms.
The below features will influence the choice of mobile that will blend with your medical application:
⦁ AR, VR, or IoT integration
⦁ Smartphones, tablets, smart speakers, and smartwatches
⦁ AI integration by Google, IBM, Microsoft
⦁ iOS or Android
Design Process
After choosing your preferred application platform, it's time to get to the design stage. Remember the appearance and feel of your application are important. Both the features fuel successful health applications—they look good and feel comfortable and functional.
You can adopt UX and UI designers that are good for creating appealing visualization for future apps and determining how it works without forgetting user experience.
Before releasing it to the market, ensure you carry out a business analysis to view what it will look like in the market and its chances of popularity. More so, you'll learn the user needs and how to meet them using your application.
Technology Stack for Healthcare Mobile App Development
Adopting appropriate technologies when creating a health app will boost the success of your app on mobile devices. You can opt for various tech stacks that work well with health care app development.
They include:
⦁ Programming languages, i.e., swift, PHP, Node js, etc.
⦁ Cloud storage like Amazon S3
⦁ Database like Mongo DB, Redis, MySQL
⦁ Payment gateway, i.e., stripe, PayPal
⦁ Utilities, i.e., Google analytics
⦁ Deployment platforms, i.e., Cloud, SaaS, Web, etc.
How Much Does it Cost to Create a Health Application?
Creating a health app is not a simple task and thus comes with pegged costs determined by included features. That said, it's hard to specify the cost of an app because you need to adopt different approaches to come up with a unique application.
Examples of Successful Healthcare Apps
When creating your health application from Scratch, you can learn much from the existing applications in the industry. They include:
⦁ Lifestyle tracking app
⦁ Yoga daily app
⦁ Health counseling app
⦁ Doctor on demand
⦁ Medscape
⦁ Ovia health and many others.
Conclusion
Building a health application from Scratch can be daunting if you don't have sufficient information on the kind of app you want.
Doing market research and customer feedback analysis will help you decide on the best application to build and introduce to the market. To be successful, ensure your application identifies a problem and creates a solution
