Looking up symptoms on Google is an activity we have all done at one time or another. And there is no shame in that. If we can look up who’s scored the most goals in FIFA history, we can also look up why I have throbbing pain in my left arm, right?
Wrong!
While Google can be an asset and tool with great power in the right conditions, when it comes to healthcare and diagnosis, it is a cesspool of poor advice and potentially life-threatening suggestions on treating a certain sickness.
But while self-diagnosis on Google is risky, there is a lot of merit to the idea of self-diagnosis. In fact, in today’s busy world, people don’t have the luxury of running to the nearest clinic or hospital whenever they feel a cold coming. Furthermore, people living in remote areas can’t go running out into the night if they’re feeling light-headed or dizzy unless they know it is something to be worried about.
In such cases, self-diagnosis isn’t just an option on the table; it’s actually a smarter choice. And thanks to the rise of AI in healthcare app development, the days of depending on Google doctors are over.
Many healthcare providers offer digital solutions to their patients, like mobile apps and AI symptom checkers. These solutions provide a new avenue to market their services to their patients and help them get easy access to medical services. AI symptom checker is one tool that has assisted people to self-diagnose and prevent unnecessary trips to the hospital. Looking at the growing popularity of these apps, more and more healthcare providers are investing in them. And if you want to build one for your healthcare business, this is the guide.
Table of Contents
What Are AI Symptom Tracker Apps, and How Do They Work?
An AI symptom tracker app is a digital solution usually integrated with a hospital’s care point and provides a chatbot for patients to interact with. These chatbots are way more sophisticated than your average chatbots. With Natural Language Processing engines in the background, AI symptom tracker apps can interact with patients and help them diagnose their maladies. These apps are smart enough, thanks to AI/ML modules, to study the symptoms provided by the patient in the chat and offer a speedy diagnosis.
Furthermore, depending on the severity of the situation, AI symptom tracker apps even provide suggestions and whether the patients need to go to the emergency room. And since these apps are integrated with actual hospitals and are looked over and trained by healthcare professionals, the suggestions and remedies they provide are trustworthy and highly accurate.
A patient’s journey with these apps starts by describing their discomfort, like “watering eyes, nausea, and headache.” Using NLP, the chatbot can have a near-human interaction with the patient and understands their problems perfectly.
Once the chatbot has the description, it provides a list of additional symptoms that the patient might have thought trivial and didn’t add to their description. The list of these additional symptoms can be wide in range since the AI and ML modules in the background have a general idea about the underlying reason for the discomfort and are now trying to identify the exact problem.
Once the system has all the information, it can identify the malady, its severity, and possible courses of action.
Thanks to the massive leaps in AI and ML app development, AI system checkers are highly accurate and, therefore, very popular among healthcare service providers and patients.
Benefits of AI Symptom Tracker App
AI symptom tracker diagnosis apps benefit healthcare providers and their patients.
- AI symptom tracker apps allow patients to get diagnoses accurately and follow an evidence-based action plan.
- Depending on the severity and nature of the diagnosis, these apps suggest to patients whether they should go to the emergency room or treat their illness at home.
- Patients don’t have to run to the hospital for minor health problems, problems that could be solved at home.
- On the flip side, if a patient faces a persistent problem in his body due to a hard-to-diagnose disease, these apps convince the users to seek medical help. This way, patients can get the required treatment before the disorder becomes complicated and life-threatening.
- These apps prevent emergency room congestion for healthcare service providers such as hospitals, physicians, and clinics. When people run to the emergency departments for every minor problem, a problem that could have easily been treated at home, the staff and resources get spread thin, and the people who actually have an emergency often receive less than adequate care and attention.
- AI symptom tracker apps help hospitals become more efficient and productive and improve the quality of healthcare services provided to patients.
- AI symptom trackers can be standalone digital solutions. But more often than not, they are integrated with a larger healthcare solution like EHR or a mobile app, making them way more flexible and scalable.
Read More – AI Healthcare Software Development: Benefits, Features and Development Process
How to Develop an AI Symptom Tracker App?
Healthcare app development is a tricky task that requires a lot of financial and time investment. Not only does your app need to be useful to the patients, but it also needs to meet a lot of compliances, be user-friendly, and be cost-effective for your business.
And if you are thinking of developing an AI symptom tracker app, then you have two options: in-house development or partnering up with a custom healthcare app development company.
While most big organizations favor in-house development, it is to be kept in mind that in-house app development is a relatively costlier and complicated affair not fit for small and medium businesses. From hiring the right talent to providing the most cutting-edge tools, you will have to bear the cost of everything.
Furthermore, you will need to provide additional support teams to ensure your development team has everything it needs and your infrastructure is in good shape. When combined, all these things rack up quite a bill not all organizations can or even want to deal with. And things get considerably more complicated if you are a first-time developer because, in that case, you will make all kinds of mistakes that will further cost you money.
As a first-time developer on a budget, it is more prudent for you to partner with a healthcare mobile app development company like Matellio. Instead of paying full-time salaries to your employees, you will only be paying an hourly price to the company. And you can scale the services up and down depending on your cash flow and market conditions. There is no substitute for experience. And when you work with a development company, you get their years of experience and avoid falling into the pitfalls many first-time developers do.
Whichever way you end up going, the following roadmap will serve you well.
Plan and Research
The first step in any healthcare app development project is planning and research. Developing an app for your healthcare business is significantly more complex than any other industry. Why? Well, on top of quality services and good customer experience, healthcare apps must adhere to many compliances and guidelines to be even listed on app stores. That is why it is paramount that you plan your AI symptom tracker app before you start developing it.
During the planning phase, you must ask yourself fundamental questions like who are the intended users of my app? Will it be a free app, or will a payment model be involved? What makes my app different than my competitors?
You also need to come up with a list of all the core features you want to add to your app. While the feature list will grow once you get AI experts involved, the initial list will be a list of all the core features that your app must have. Some of the must-have features for AI symptom tracker apps are:
NLP-based Chatbot
An NLP-based chatbot will aid in analyzing the symptoms of your patients. The users need to input common concerns like ‘headache with fever’ or ‘burning sensation in eyes,’ and the NLP-driven chatbot will carefully understand the intent behind those messages to offer them suitable guidance.
Robust AI/ML Modules
The smart AI/ML algorithms will be the base of your AI symptom tracker app. Those algorithms will learn from the vast data experienced healthcare providers provide to offer the most suitable suggestion for the patients.
User-friendly Interface
That one’s most important to succeed in today’s competitive era. You must focus on providing an easy yet engaging interface to your users. Even if you have added the latest features that are not accessible by your users, they are useless. Hence, add simple yet intuitive UI elements to your AI symptom tracker app.
Account Creation and Management
You must have a dedicated account management portal to check your app’s total number of users. Besides, that portal will also help you solve the account creation issues of your patients in real time.
EHR Integration
EHR stands for electronic health records and is widely used in almost all hospitals/clinics worldwide. Integrating EHR with your AI symptom tracker app will help you locate your patient’s current or past treatments. You can then present more accurate healthcare advice to your patients.
Backend Dashboards
The backend dashboard will contain all the information you need to run your AI symptom tracker. For instance, you can check the treatment for a particular symptom or see the signs that the patients mostly enter to enhance your app further.
Admin Panel
Having a dedicated admin panel is essential to facilitate proper management. The admin must be able to control various aspects of the app, including pending payments, total traffic on the app, user analytics, and the accuracy of the suggestions made by the AI modules.
Besides, they must even be able to send push notifications to the users regarding any new offer or changes in the privacy policies.
Social Login
Nowadays, people prefer to fill in several fields to register on the app. Hence, like other popular mobile applications, you must also provide social login feature to your users. With that, your patients can log in to the AI symptom tracker app using their Gmail, Facebook, or any other social media profile.
Payment Gateway
You must offer online payment options to your users for a seamless experience. The payment gateway integration helps users pay online using multiple payment methods, including debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, etc.
You must also decide whether your app will be an Android or an iOS app. While the market for both is big, which OS is supported by your target users will have a lot to say. The best approach is to build your AI/ML healthcare app for as many platforms as possible.
A great way to get more information on what you should and shouldn’t do while developing an AI symptom tracker app is to look at your competitors and their offerings. You can learn what to do and what not to do from their apps and try to bring their best features into your app while leaving out the ones that feel half-baked or aren’t liked by the customers.
Hire Experienced Healthcare App Development Experts
Once you have an initial plan, it is time to hire expert healthcare app development specialists who can guide you through the development process. As discussed before, you can build an in-house team or hire an external healthcare app development company to develop your app for you.
While making this decision, be sure to take a look at the firm’s records and portfolios. You want to hire a company with experience building AI/ML healthcare apps. Many mobile app development service providers in the market provide cost-effective services for businesses of all sizes. Pick the one you like, and then you can move on to the next phase.
Develop Your AI Symptom Tracker App
With the help of your healthcare mobile app development company, you can further improve your plan. Your AI experts will be able to guide you in some key areas, like what additional features to add and what tech stack to use.
Before you go too far down this road, it is better to develop an MVP. An MVP, a minimum viable product, is a leaner version of the final app with only core features. While a little light on features, this app is fully functioning and so you can provide it to some test groups of customers and see how they like it. MVPs are a great tool to gather customer feedback before the solution is even out. And the best part is, if the MVP doesn’t get a good response from the customers, you can go back to the drawing board and make changes since you didn’t blow your entire budget on the finished product. This way, you’re ensuring that you’re developing an app that customers want.
If the MVP gets good feedback, you can finish the product and move on to the next phase.
Read More – Why You Should Start With the MVP for Mobile App Development?
Test and Deploy
Once you’re done developing your app, you must test it thoroughly for bugs, glitches, and compliance adherence. Your QA team will run thousands of tests to make sure that you deploy a quality product that will be valued by the customers and will increase your brand dominance.
Post-launch Support
After the launch, you need to fix bugs and glitches that might not have surfaced in the QA runs. Furthermore, you need to improve your app according to customer feedback. Once your app is out in the wild, you will see a consistent influx of feedback, suggestions, and complaints, and you will have to do your best to address all of them.
Aside from fixes and patches, you will need to add more features to your app to compete in the market and keep your customers interested.
Hence, you must partner with an experienced healthcare app development company having expertise in AI development services.
That’s where Matellio comes in!
With a decade-long experience in software engineering and expertise in creating next-gen solutions, we can help you develop a custom AI symptom checker app tailored to your business needs. Our talented healthcare software developers have designed and delivered several solutions to the healthcare industry.
Whether redesigning an existing system or creating a smart solution right from scratch, we offer assistance for your healthcare software development. Besides that, you can also leverage our wide array of professional software development services, including digital consulting, MVP development, proof of concept service, UI/UX services, testing, and maintenance.
We also offer AI development services to help you enhance your custom solution and win the competition curve. So, fill out our consultation form to get started! Also, enjoy perks like a free 30-minute consultation call, market research, competitor analysis, and a no-obligation quote for your AI app development.
Conclusion
Today’s era is all about mobile services. Whether you are from finance or healthcare, people want to enjoy services on their preferred mobile devices. And, when it comes to healthcare consultation or symptom tracker, mobile app development can be a game changer!
Hence, you must invest in AI symptom tracker app development to elevate your healthcare services and become a pioneer in your niche. Connect with us over a free call to learn more about the AI symptom checker app and our offerings for your business.
