The Ultimate Healthcare App Development Guide: Benefits, Features, and Cost

Technology is taking its grip on every walk of human life. This is evident with the increasing digitization of healthcare services. Today, there are different types of healthcare apps that enable users to access various services at their fingertips. 

There is an increasing demand for healthcare services, and smartphone apps can help healthcare businesses tackle the need. As per Statista, the mobile medical app market size is expected to reach $11 billion by 2025. Now you understand how big is healthcare app industry.

Therefore, many entrepreneurs have foreseen the opportunity of healthcare mobile app development and looking to invest in it. But before committing any money, they need an answer to many questions including the healthcare app development cost.

There are many questions like:

• Which type of healthcare app to create?
• What features should a healthcare app have?
• How to choose a healthcare app development partner?
• How much does it cost to develop a healthcare mobile app?

There are more questions that an entrepreneur needs to find answers to before investing a single penny. Besides this, you will also be able to choose the right healthcare application development services to build a perfect app. 

This healthcare mobile app development blog will try to answer all your questions and help you in making an informed decision. So, keep reading for detailed information including benefits, features, and the cost of a healthcare app project

What is Healthcare App Development?

A healthcare mobile app is a kind of mobile application that provides facilities and features for monitoring and tracking a person’s health-related activities, assisting users in managing his or her daily life routine including diet and nutrition, and more. 

Besides this, when we talk about healthcare apps, they are not just the apps that offer doctor consultations, medical records, diagnoses, etc, they are more than that. In fact, these apps are healthcare and wellness apps. 

Wellness apps address social, mental, physical, and even spiritual factors affecting overall health. In addition, Fitness app development is also a part of the health and wellness app category. 

With healthcare app development, you can build a mobile app that will offer all health-related features to users.

What are the Different Types of Healthcare Apps?

There are many types of healthcare mobile apps currently available in the market. And, each of these apps offers various features and services. Thanks to these apps the term mHealth has become a popular phenomenon nowadays. This term defines the practice of public health and medicine supported by mobile devices. 

Let’s see the various types of healthcare app development.

1. Fitness and Wellness Apps

• Fitness tracking apps
• Women’s health apps
• Mental health apps
• Lifestyle & wellness apps
• Self-monitoring apps
• Diet & nutrition apps

2. Healthcare Apps for Patients

• Chronic Disease Management Apps
• Patient medical education apps
• Patient health tracking apps
• Telemedicine apps
• Symptom checking mobile apps

3. For Medical Professionals

• Hospital Information Database
• Patient Health Tracking App
• Remote Patient Monitoring
• Medical reference & database apps
• Doctor appointment & clinical assistance apps
• Professional networking apps (for doctors)

There is now a broad range of mobile apps that offer health and wellness services. So, entrepreneurs have a great opportunity to invest in a mobile app offering various services. 

However, they need to choose a reliable mobile app development company to capitalize on their skills to develop a perfect mobile app. 

To understand healthcare mobile app development in detail, let’s take an overview of the most popular healthcare apps. 

Doctor-on-Demand Apps

One of the most popular healthcare mobile types is the doctor-on-demand app. These apps allow a doctor to connect with patients via video call. Also, these apps offer a more flexible schedule to doctors as they can now see a patient anywhere in the world. 

These mobile apps offer a convenient way for patients and doctors to consult and diagnose the health issue. Besides this, a patient is also confident in their complex health issues by having the doctor in front of them.

Medical Record Apps

Another type of healthcare app development is a medical record app. When patients go to a doctor, they need a form or patient card documenting their personal and medical information. Luckily, this old-fashioned method can be replaced with a medical record app to go paperless and keep that data digitally safe. As a result, this gives patients more control over their medical information and streamline the appointment process.

Pharmacy Delivery Apps

Pharmacy delivery apps make it easy for users to get all their medicines anywhere and anytime. Well, it takes a few taps to upload the prescription and order medicine with these apps that are delivered to your doorstep. Further, this is one of the major digital health app development categories pouring in lots of investments around the world.

Chronic Disease Management Apps

There is increasing use of chronic disease management apps that allow patients to consult their doctors as they need. People who suffer from high blood pressure, diabetes, and lupus need their doctors to ensure that they get the desired treatment. 

Chronic disease management apps allow doctors to track and share a patient’s health data easily and in a convenient format. Therefore, it helps patients manage their conditions and get proper treatment from their doctors. And, this is also a popular healthcare app development category.

Mental Health Services Apps

Mobile apps are also used to fight against anxiety, drug addiction, and mental problems. Indeed, the advent of mental health services apps has helped patients suffering from mental problems or addictions get the right treatment easily. 

We have seen the popular mobile apps in the healthcare and wellness category. So, before heading towards any other step, you first need to understand what type of healthcare app development you wish to choose. 

Once you know the exact requirement, you then think about the features of your app. So, your next question will be what features should a health app have? Our next section tries to answer this question.

Must-Have Healthcare Mobile App Development Features

Besides the healthcare mobile app features, this section will shed light on the benefits of healthcare app development in this category. In order to create the right healthcare app for your business, you must decide what features it will offer to end users. The following are the key features that a healthcare app should have. 

1. User-friendly UI

User interface plays a crucial role in whether users will like the app or not. So, keep your app simple and less intrusive. For this, focus on creating an app that offers the best user experience instead of putting so many heavy animations that will make your app slow and confusing. 

2. User Profile Registration

Irrespective of what type of healthcare app development you choose, there should be a way to create users’ profiles. Also, include sign-in with multiple options like email, phone number, and social media accounts to your app. Besides this, you also need to ensure personal data security because health or medical-related information is sensitive.

3. Video Consultation

One obvious feature when it comes to healthcare mobile app development is video consulting. No doubt, your healthcare app should have a feature to allow patients to connect with doctors and vice versa via video call. 

4. Appointment Schedule

This feature is needed in telemedicine app development. You have to enable functionality with live chat and video conferencing in your app that allows patients to book an appointment with registered doctors in your app.

5. Symptom Checker

It is a kind of digital calculator that calculates the age, place, gender, and symptoms of illness. Also, the healthcare apps can also have a feature to suggest the right medical specialist based on their symptoms. 

6. Data Storage

Electronic healthcare record is a highly necessary application for medical professionals and hospitals. This kind of application lets doctors and medical professionals store patent files and medical reports like x-rays, ECG, sugar level, blood group, health recovery, and more.

7. Payment 

Patients may need to make payments. So, choose a secure payment gateway for healthcare app development for secure payments. You can hire an expert for creating an app with a payment option. For example, you can hire Android developers to integrate a payment gateway into your Android app. 

Modern Healthcare App Development With New-Age Features

Be it a telemedicine app, on-demand doctor appointment app, fitness app, health tracking app, or any other type, entrepreneurs are now developing new-age healthcare apps with cutting-edge technologies. 

Today, there are lots of advanced techs that you can use for healthcare app development to get an edge over your competitors. 

Here are these advanced techs.

1. Blockchain

Blockchain is not just about the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, it is a technology implementation that you can use in any field even for healthcare app development. In essence, blockchain is basically a kind of database for blocks that are encrypted and linked to each other. 

So, a blockchain is a chain of blocks where blocks are the data generated by a user and encrypted. The data on the blockchain cannot be altered.  

In healthcare apps, blockchain can be used to maintain health records and other patient data that will remain secure and accessible to all. 

No one can tamper with this data. So, you can leverage blockchain technology for your app to make it more secure and advanced. For this, you need to hire blockchain developers to build a modern app.

2. AI (Artificial Intelligence)

You can utilize AI in healthcare app development to learn from the pattern of patients’ health conditions and provide more precise treatment. Artificial Intelligence can leverage the data collected through the app about their health to monitor and provide suggestions. 

For example, there are many fitness apps and wearable apps that can read data to draw insights and provide useful suggestions. 

Must Read: Top Mobile App Development Trends Shaping the Future of Apps

Now that you have gone through the various features you need for your healthcare app. The next question you may ask is what are the benefits of healthcare mobile app development? 

Let’s check the benefits below.

What is the Benefit of Healthcare App Development?

The main benefit of a healthcare mobile app development is it provides fast, easy, secure access and features to maintain and care for individual health. In today’s growing challenges in public healthcare management, the need for healthcare mobile apps is growing more than ever.

Indeed, if you pay attention to the latest report of Fortune Business Insights, the global mHealth apps market size was $24.93 billion in 2020, but with the impact of Covid-19, the market is projected to reach $314.60 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 34.8% for the forecast period 2021-2028.

So, investing in health tech app development surely gives many advantages to companies, startups, and entrepreneurs who want to establish their own venture through a mobile app and bring transformation to the public healthcare system. Moreover, the various benefits described below give an answer to what is the importance of healthcare app development more precisely:

1. Benefits for Doctors

• Remote diagnoses from anywhere across the world
• Easy way to retrieve patient history
• Improve medical adherence
• Make online patient monitoring easy
• Improve medication reconciliation accuracy that ensures patient safety
• Fast and secure way of communication with patients

2. Benefits for Patients

• On-demand doctor appointment
• Easy and transparent medical payment
• Reduce the unnecessary cost of doctor’s appointment
• Remote access to doctors anywhere in the globe
• Save money and time
• Avoid visiting the hospital in case of normal disease

3. Benefits for normal people

• Maintain good health
• Manage diet and nutrition with more accuracy
• Track health status on the go
• Improve mental health
• Reduce stress and anxiety with mediation apps
• Predict disease and prepare in advance
• Customize health routine with personalization

Examples of Digital Healthcare Apps

Before investing in fitness app development or any other healthcare app, you want to see some apps that have already made a success. So, there are lots of healthcare apps today available for both Android and iOS users. 

• Assessment
• The Wonder Weeks 
• Fitbit
• Calm
• Headspace 
• Doctor on Demand

These are the popular healthcare apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store respectively which are generating millions of dollars of revenue.

Moreover, the way the number of mHelath users is increasing, demand for mobile app development for healthcare and fitness is growing tremendously.

The Process of Healthtech App Development 

Undoubtedly, healthcare mobile app development is a big decision that requires a lot of thought and time to make it a success. Further, there are various steps in healthcare app development starting from ideation and ending with testing and deployment. So, it’s essential to look at what process is followed to build such an app.

The process of developing a healthcare mobile app:

• Ideation: Identify the needs and requirements of the end users and the features you need.
• Identify the Platform: You need to decide whether you want an Android app or an iOS app or a cross-platform for both users.
• UI/UX Design: It consists of creating the user interface and adding the elements that enhance the user experience.
  
• Choose a Tech Partner: Hire the right developers to build your app. Know more about this in the later section.
• Launch an MVP: It’s advisable to validate an app idea with MVP development services to save money. An MVP is an app with basic features to test if it works with the users.
• Development and Testing: This phase includes the actual development steps where the business logic is created for your app. It creates the backend for your app.
• Tracking and Maintenance: Track the app performance. Your app needs maintenance to integrate new features, fix bugs and performance issues, and more.

Tech Stack for Digital Healthcare App Development

You should know which types of technologies are available to develop a healthcare mobile app. Moreover, the technology you choose depends on what type of app you want. For example, you may want to build a native application for Android or iOS. Also, you can build a cross-platform mobile app that will be compatible with both operating systems. 

Besides this, there are different technologies if you want to develop a web app or a hybrid mobile app. As a matter of fact, web apps are supported on both Android and iOS but can function through a web browser only. Also, they lack native app features. 

A hybrid app combines the capabilities of both native apps and web apps. Thus, they function like native apps and web apps. 

The following are the technologies that you can use for healthcare app development. 

• React Native: It is a popular mobile app framework that helps to build cross-platform mobile apps. It’s open source and free.
• Flutter: This is a mobile UI development kit that is also open source and available with a free license. It helps to build engaging apps with its vast UI library.
• Ionic: It allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps and hybrid apps. It is also open source.
• Java: A popular programming language for developing Android applications.
• Kotlin: This is now the official programming language for Android development.
• Swift: It is a programming language to build interactive web apps for Apple devices.

There are lots of other frameworks, tools, and technologies used in healthcare app development. However, you can choose any of the above technologies for developing your mobile app. 

Must Read: How to Choose the Right Framework to Develop Your Mobile App?

How Do Healthcare Apps Earn? Revenue Model for Healthcare App Development

Ever wondered how healthcare apps earn? Thinking how do I promote my healthcare app once built? This section will shed light on these types of questions. The following are some important app monetizing methods. 

1. Freemium Model

Under a freemium model, two types of versions are available free and premium which makes the word ‘Freemium.’ Further. the free version offers only the basic functionality of an app and asks users to upgrade to paid version for advanced features.

2. Promotions

With this monetization method for healthcare app development, app owners can collaborate with third-party vendors to promote their services and products on the app with special offers and discounts. 

3. Subscription and Registration Fees

Such apps offer subscription plans that users can subscribe to for accessing the app’s content without paying any extra charge. 

4. In-App Advertisements

In such a monetization model, apps can earn by displaying in-app ads. People using the app are forced to see in-app ads to use the app. Interestingly, this is one of the used monetization methods that you can also pick for your healthcare app development. 

Key Considerations for Healthcare Mobile App Development

There are lots of things that you need to consider to develop a successful healthcare mobile app. Moreover, healthcare mobile app development is hectic and complex and you don’t need a hang of everything, but there are some crucial factors to consider. 

1. HIPAA Compliance

Many businesses develop an app and overlook the various compliances they need to fulfil to make their app legal. For example, HIPAA compliance is one of the most important compliances especially when you are creating a healthcare mobile app. So, make sure your app meets important compliances like HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, and CCPA. 

2. Choose One Side

As has been discussed, there are different types of apps in the health and wellness category like fitness tracking apps. So, what makes them popular is they are focused on a particular sub-category. Thus, choose a healthcare app development niche instead of making an all-in-one solution. 

3. Strong Security

Your healthcare app will be dealing with sensitive user data and it’s responsibility to ensure the utmost protection of this data. Hence, you should choose the strongest security protocols to make sure that your app is hack-proof and 100% reliable. 

4. APIs and Third-party Integration

Make sure that you choose the right APIs and integrate third-party services so they don’t compromise your app’s security and reliability. Moreover, you can rely on mobile app developers to create custom APIs for your app based on your requirements. 

How to Choose a Healthcare App Developer?

You need the right team to develop your healthcare mobile application. And, there are three options to choose from: an in-house team, offshore developers, and freelancers. Let’s take a look at each of these options to choose a good one for your healthcare app development project. 

1. In-house Team

You can have an in-house team for healthcare app development. This will ensure complete control over the team and you can build a mobile app more effectively. However, having an in-house team is very costly because you will bear all expenses related to salaries, rent, equipment, training, hiring, and so on. 

2. Hire Offshore Developers

There is an immense talent around the world that you can leverage to build your healthcare application. So, you can hire offshore mobile app developers to utilize their expertise to create an excellent mobile app. It offers numerous benefits as you pay for the services you get, they have knowledge and experience, and they use the latest technologies. However, there can be cultural, timezone, and coordination problems, but can resolve with the right team. 

3. Freelancers 

You can choose a developer on a freelancing platform like Upwork. Indeed, there are different types of developers and you can choose based on your requirements and budget. Besides this, freelancers are often affordable but the quality may not be perfect. So, it is possible that you may not get the quality of work you are expecting from freelancers. 

How Much Does Healthcare App Development Cost?

Now comes the most important question – how much does a basic healthcare mobile app cost? There are different factors that affect the telemedicine app development cost. In short, these factors are the technology, features, complexity, and more. 

The cost of an iPhone app development depends on various factors such as the country location of the iPhone app development company, number of features, technology-stack used, type of app-native or hybrid, and capability to run on mobile OS platforms-Android and iOS.

For Android development, it doesn’t cost a. The healthcare app development cost for an entry-level app with common features will cost you around $15000-$30,000. Anyways, you can always consult an Android app development company to get a precise cost estimate. 

But for iOS, you will need to outsource your project to an iPhone app development company or hire iOS app developers who may charge you from $50-$200 per hour. However, in India, you can get your healthcare app development project successfully done at the most affordable price range starting from $25 per hour.

Why MobileCoderz for Healthcare App Development?

We are a leading mobile app development company with excellent experience in developing mobile apps for a wide range of industries including healthcare. Indeed, our developers are proficient in the latest mobile app technologies, frameworks, and tools. Moreover, we can develop a healthcare app as per your requirement. 

At MobileCoderz don’t make cookie-cutter mobile apps, but offer end-to-end services to deliver an app that establishes your brand in the market. We have a team of creative designers and innovative app developers to build cutting-edge apps for clients. So, you can rely on our healthcare app development services to build a modern and flexible app for your business. 

Book a Free Consultation and Talk to Our Experts

Final Note

Healthcare mobile app development requires intelligent and high-standard programming techniques to ensure the app offers a seamless and flawless app usage experience. The Healthcare industry is expected to incorporate more mobile apps to provide better healthcare facilities in the future.

If you are looking to create a healthcare app and offer something unique to people, we can help you with this. MobileCoderz is a leading mobile app development company in India and USA. We provide Android and iPhone app development services for all types of healthcare apps. 

This complete guide has covered all the aspects of healthcare app development. It has covered features, app types, healthcare app development costs, and other aspects. This information will be helpful for you to make the right decision. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of healthcare mobile apps?

Healthcare mobile apps offer several benefits, including convenient access to healthcare services, real-time health monitoring, personalized health recommendations, and improved patient outcomes. These apps also help healthcare providers to improve patient engagement and deliver more efficient care.

How much does it cost to develop a healthcare mobile app?

The cost of developing a healthcare mobile app depends on various factors, including the complexity of the app, the number of features, the platform used, and the development team’s location. Generally, the cost of developing a healthcare app can range from $10,000 to $500,000 or more.

How long does it take to develop a healthcare mobile app?

The time required to develop a healthcare mobile app depends on the app’s complexity and features. Simple apps may take a few weeks to develop, while more complex apps can take several months or even years to complete.

What are the security concerns associated with healthcare mobile apps?

Healthcare mobile apps must comply with various data privacy and security regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. To ensure the security of patient information, healthcare mobile apps must implement strong encryption, data backup, and access control measures.

How can healthcare providers promote their mobile apps to patients?

Healthcare providers can promote their mobile apps to patients by using various marketing channels such as social media, email newsletters, and in-person visits. They can also offer incentives such as discounts and free consultations to encourage patients to download and use the app.