The world is changing at a much faster speed, and so are the various aspects of the global market. Be it education, retail, or even healthcare industry, each of them has shown tremendous growth in the past few years, and are continuing to grow by leveraging the latest technological advancements. Telemedicine is one such app that has made the lives of both the doctors and the patients incredibly simpler and efficient. Telemedicine, a subset of telehealth, has transformed the landscape of the healthcare industry, by introducing an extensive range of modern technological services and robust tools.
According to Satista, the market size of telemedicine apps was approximately 30.5 billion US dollars in the year 2019, and it is predicted to reach $41.2 billion by the end of 2021. Hence, it is certain that the telemedicine sector, without a doubt, is gaining huge popularity among patients, doctors, and even investors. Let’s look at some benefits of developing a telemedicine app to get a clear view of the profits of developing a telemedicine app.
Benefits of Telemedicine App Development
We all know that the first and foremost priority of the people is to maintain good health, and telemedicine apps help people to achieve that. With telemedicine apps, the patients can seamlessly connect to expert healthcare service providers without even leaving their house. The telemedicine app, besides helping the patients, is also an effective tool for the doctors, the doctors can seamlessly share the medical prescriptions with the patients, and can also monitor their health while sitting remotely. Let us have a look at some more benefits of telemedicine apps that attract more patients and doctors.
1. Readily Available Services
Telemedicine apps can serve as a great tool in the far-flung areas that have minimal or no healthcare services. With telemedicine apps, the people, especially the elderly,kids and womens, can seamlessly reach out to doctors and healthcare service providers to get proper medical facilities.
2. Convenient Medical Care
It is no surprise that a lot of time is wasted when a person physically visits a hospital or goes for the doctor’s consultation. Also, if you need to visit a specialist, then the process might take a longer time. However, with the telemedicine app, you can seamlessly schedule an appointment with the preferred doctor, and can even get prescriptions by the doctor via the app. Interestingly, a lot of patients are leveraging this facility, almost 53% to be precise.
3. Medical Record Mobility
It is no surprise that even in the modern world, it’s very difficult to obtain and access our medical records. However, a telemedicine app enables the patients to view their medical records and send them to family members and doctors. Getting the right healthcare technology consulting services can help in unveiling new features to make the availability of medical records more streamlined and effective.
4. Time Management
The healthcare providers can manage their schedules and appointments efficiently using the telemedicine app. That means, the doctors could have more time to examine patients and improve their working efficiency.
5. Efficient Data Storage
With telemedicine applications, the practitioners and other healthcare providers could seamlessly access and store critical medical data efficiently. That means, it becomes very easy to access these records and share them with other doctors for better treatment.
So, these were some of the amazing benefits of the telemedicine app, that can prove profitable for healthcare startups. Owing to these great benefits, many companies have launched their telemedicine apps, let’s look at some of the top telemedicine apps of 2020.
Top Telemedicine Apps of 2020
1. Doxy.me
Doxy.me is a simple, secure, and user-friendly healthcare app that seamlessly connects medical practitioners with the patients. It is a cloud-based application that integrates well with the EHR, or practice management software to enhance your business operations. One of the greatest features of this robust app is that it offers a free and unlimited service for its users to facilitate better communication. Meaning, you can seamlessly send voice notes and videos to your patients for managing them more efficiently.
Available For : Android and iOS
2. Doctor on Demand
Doctor on Demand is without a doubt one of the most popular telemedicine apps for quite some time now and maintains one of the highest customer ratings. This app is quite useful for the patients looking for treatment of acute illness like, common cold, allergies, rashes, and so on. Besides that, the app offers solutions to every problem ranging from fear to relationship problems. The registration is easy and the functionalities are user-friendly.
Available For : Android and iOS
3. MDLIVE
MDLIVE is an amazing telemedicine app that offers easy, and convenient access to a doctor when a local GP is not available. The patients don’t have to wait too much for the doctor’s appointment as the average waiting time is nearly 15 minutes. Moreover, to simplify the process further, the company also introduced an AI assistant feature to help the patients. The application also offers medication-tracking facilities to the patients.
Available For : Android and iOS
4. HealthTap
HealthTap is again a powerful telemedicine app that offers 24/7 access to the patients to book the doctor’s appointments. A unique feature of this amazing app is its huge database that the app collects from questionnaires, and through doctors and specialists’ notes. Again, the AI feature of this app can help you find the answers to your queries, and can analyze the data to find the best course of action for you.
Available For : Android and iOS
How to Develop a Telemedicine Mobile App?
After critically examining the aim and benefits of telemedicine apps and after discussing some other relevant apps, let us now look at ways to develop a feature-rich telemedicine app to grow your healthcare startup. Here are some crucial steps that a person involved in healthcare must follow for smooth development of telemedicine apps.
1. Learn the Regulations
The first and foremost step while developing a telemedicine mobile app is to learn all ins and outs of healthcare policies of your target country or region. You need to remember that every country has different legislations that protect sensitive personal data of the patients and doctors. For instance, in the US, HIPAA is the main act that regulates the security measures for digital healthcare records and their use.
2. Build a Strong Strategy
The second crucial step in the development of a telemedicine app is to build a proper strategy that efficiently satisfies your business goals. For that, you need to firstly analyze your competitor’s website and data. Then figure out what problems your app could solve and in what ways can it surpass your competitor’s application. All this will help you to make the most feasible app that too at less cost.
3. Select a Suitable Technology
In the long run, it is critical to select a proper technology to build success for your mobile application. And thanks to recent advancements, we now have ample technological options that can serve perfectly and can cater to all our business needs. Below mentioned are some of the powerful technologies that have proved to be perfect for the healthcare industry.
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Artificial Intelligence
AI, or artificial intelligence is, without a doubt, the most disruptive technology in the modern times. AI has been serving as a fantastic tool in the telemedicine sector for quite some time now. AI-driven chatbots, voice recognition systems, and new advances in the natural learning process has also promoted growth in the above-mentioned sector.
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IoT
IoT is another crucial technology that has facilitated the growth of the healthcare sector. Many equipment such as tablets, medical kiosks, digital cameras, smartwatches, etc. have been amazingly helpful for the doctors during the recent times. The Internet of Things has also made it feasible for the healthcare service providers to track, and diagnose the medical conditions of the patients. Moreover, it is also helping the doctors in building emergency response systems, to streamline their workflow more efficiently.
Also Read- How is IoT Revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry?
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Big Data
We all know that a lot of information is generated in the healthcare sector and much of this information or data is very crucial for both the patients and the doctors. So, with the help of big data analysis, the medical organizations could seamlessly track and analyze several amounts of data within minutes or in the best case scenario, within seconds. They can seamlessly generate and evaluate EHR (electronic healthcare records) and can share the data to other specialists easily, to conduct more medical research, or to get better medication.
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Blockchain
Blockchain can be used effectively by the healthcare industry to exchange large amounts of data efficiently and to secure the data storage. Blockchain technology serves as a perfect tool in excluding the loss of healthcare data, when compared to paper records. That’s a critical aspect for the healthcare app!
4. Identify the Relevant Features
That’s the most critical section of the development phase. In order to fully satisfy your users and to outgrow your competitor, you need to include all the viable features in your app. Here are some of them that you can include.
For Patients
1. Authentication
Patients can easily sign up with their email or phone number and get started with the app. Also, since the telemedicine app deals with sensitive data of the user, the admin could leverage two-factor authentication to secure the app and its data.
2. Browse Doctors
The patients could seamlessly search a doctor using special filters such as ratings and reviews, specialization, etc. using this feature.
3. Appointments and Calendars
The app efficiently manages the appointments of the patients based on the availability of the doctor and also offers them the facility to edit or delete the appointments.
4. Video Consultations
The video consultation module enables the patients to connect with the provider through two-way video communication.
5. Secure Messaging
The patients can chat seamlessly with the doctors to get an update of their health status in real-time.
6. Online Payments
An integrated payment gateway that enables the patients to pay the doctor’s fees without going to the physical location.
7. Geolocation
The geolocation service enables the patients to connect with valid practitioners by gathering their location with the help of Google Maps or similar services.
8. Medication Tracking
With medication tracking functionality, the app reminds a patient to take necessary medications and to order a refill.
For Doctors
1. Online Profile
The doctors can seamlessly get started and create their online profile by simply using their email, contact number, and testimonials within the app.
2. Schedule Management
The doctors can view all of their schedules at one place and can seamlessly add other appointments manually using this feature.
3. Share Prescriptions
The prescription module helps the doctors to create and share the prescriptions seamlessly with the patients via email.
4. EHR Review
The doctors can check a patient’s records via their profiles, preliminary-filled questionnaires, or from the hospital’s database, using this feature.
5. Appointment Reminder
The doctors can know who is requesting for an appointment and can reply accordingly from the app leveraging multiple interaction options.
6. Integrated Billing
An integrated billing feature that allows the doctors to charge and receive their fees from the patients via digital payment platforms.
7. Pharmacy Databases
The app seamlessly integrates with the drug store to provide patients and doctors with necessary medicine on time.
8. Queries and Issues
The module enhances the engagement of the doctors with the patients by letting the doctors answer all the queries and issues of the patients.
For Admin
1. Intuitive Dashboard
A comprehensive dashboard with a bird’s eye view to provide significant statistics and critical information over active engagements, patients, doctors, etc. to the admin.
2. Doctor Management
The admins can efficiently manage and track all the registered doctors and other healthcare service providers using this feature.
3. Patient Management
Besides managing the doctors, the admins can also track the details of the patients along with all their details.
4. Appointment Management
The admins can view all the booked, canceled, and completed appointments of the doctors, or even those added or deleted by the patients.
5. Calendar View
The module enables the admins to view the appointments for all the doctors in a visual layout on a calendar.
6. Notifications
Push notification for the patients and doctors to keep them updated about every little thing and all the latest updates of the app.
7. Reports and Analytics
The reports and analytics feature helps the admin view the performance of their app through visual-rich reports and powerful analytics.
Extra Features
1. Multi-User Chat
An integrated chat functionality to enable the doctors or healthcare service providers to chat with multiple users in real-time.
2. Treatment Notes
The doctors and healthcare providers can seamlessly add notes, medical treatment, and other evaluation documents within the app.
3. Personalized Feed
A personalized space for patients where they can seamlessly view their medical records, updates from doctors, and other vital health information.
4. Session Recording
Both the patients and the healthcare service providers can leverage this functionality to upload their consultation videos that could be used in the future.
5. Insurance Plan
A useful feature that integrates the patient’s insurance plan within the app with the help of insurance providers.
5. Choose an Experienced Mobile App Development Company
After carefully evaluating all the relevant features for your mobile app, it’s now time to develop it. For that, you can either hire your in-house development team or can outsource the work for mobile app development. Both have their benefits. However, outsourcing a development team may sometimes prove beneficial. An experienced mobile app development company helps you reduce your operational costs and delivers the best-in-class product. It has complete knowledge of all the aspects of a perfect mobile app and certainly has all the answers to your queries. Here are some tips for choosing an excellent mobile app development company for your project.
6. Monetization Model For Generating Revenue
Besides selecting the powerful technology and after including all the relevant features, it is still necessary to opt for an appropriate monetization model for your telemedicine app. With the monetization model, you can efficiently add more success to your app in terms of revenue. Here are some of the ways through which you can monetize your app.
- Software as a Service
Under this model, you can provide your application as a service to a medical organization.
- Pay per Consultation
You can include the charges for doctor’s consultation as per the location and speciality of the healthcare service provider.
- Membership
In this business model, the patients as well as the doctors need to pay a certain amount to access the app smoothly. The charges could be monthly or it can be annual charges.
- Franchising
At last, the product could also be sold as a franchise, if the market has enough potential, or in simple words, similar apps are in trend in the market.
7. Deploy and Market Your App
The final step of mobile app development is to launch the product in the global market. However, there are some things that you should keep in mind before launching your product.
- Always make sure to market your product enough before launching it.
- Run all the tests very carefully on it to check its tolerance power.
- Make sure the design of the app is user-friendly, and the app is functioning.
What Are The Challenges In The Development of Telemedicine Mobile Application?
1. UI/UX Interface Design
The admins need to consider the importance of user-friendly interface while developing the telemedicine app. The app should have simple and easy-to-use functionality and it should be accessible for the people with disabilities. For that, you can include voice control options and can leverage voice assistants and chatbots in your mobile app.
2. Back-end Development
To further enhance the functionality of the app, you should always consider integrating other powerful third-party applications like EHR systems, patient management systems, and so on. You need to consider their feasibility before integrating them in your application.
3. Security Concerns
Security is a major concern in the modern-day world. Your telemedicine app should possess highly secured features that could safeguard healthcare records and patient’s data. You need to consider all the essential precautionary measures to safely store, exchange, and process healthcare related information. You can leverage disruptive technologies like blockchain to ensure secure data transfer.
4. Lack of Trust
There are always trust issues amongst the patients while utilizing the telemedicine app. They always need to have some sort of guarantee that the doctor they are consulting is certified by the government. Hence, you need to include a clear review system in order to develop a sense of trust among patients.
How Much Does It Cost To Develop A Telemedicine Mobile App?
The cost of developing a telemedicine mobile app varies from region to region. For instance, if you hire developers from the USA, they will charge you more as compared to the developers from India. However, there are some vital aspects to which the cost of developing a mobile application depends.
- Development Cost
- UI/UX Cost
- Management Cost
- Testing Cost
- IT Support Cost
The actual cost, however, varies based on many more criteria. If you want an accurate estimate of your project, then you may contact us anytime by visiting www.matellio.co.uk
Let’s Build a Telemedicine App!
Telemedicine sector has transformed drastically during the recent times. The telemedicine app has facilitated smooth communication among specialists and patients, and offered some robust features like video sessions recording to help analyze patients as precisely as possible. However, to make your application progressively sound for clients, you should include definite data about each specialist and permit patients to audit and rate specialists. This will make your telemedicine app popular among people and will generate a sense of trust in them.
We, at Matellio, can help you develop cost-effective and scalable healthcare software solutions to build success for your healthcare organization. Feel free to get in touch with us and post your inquiries in regards to telemedicine advancement. We’ll ensure every patient finds a specialist through your application.
