Everything You Need to Know Before You Hire Healthcare App Developers

Swarnendu De October 22, 2018

We’ve talked about how different healthcare app ideas are taken over by startups. And how these apps are making people fitter, more productive and enjoy a happy life. In fact, I’ve composed an article that talks about the top 5 healthcare app ideas in case you want to create your own app. But getting started is not easy…

To make sure your healthcare app reaches the top chart, you need to rise above the fray with your uniqueness, market standards, and usability. And the first step towards creating a masterpiece is by developing an app that functional, safe and aesthetically beautiful. In addition, healthcare app developers you hire must work towards making user data protected from privacy threats.

Here comes the challenge…

But before we move any further talking about the risks and challenges, let’s understand if taking the risks is worth it.

Is Investing in Healthcare App Worth Taking the Risk?

Taking an overview of the current healthcare app market trend, we saw a few things. App stores are splurging with so-called healthcare apps. It is expected that mHealth apps will reach a valuation of 60 billion by 2020, in a research by Statista.

But what has provoked this increase? Well, to be specific:

  • Healthcare or mHealth apps are promoting better habits for wellbeing by offering numerous advice
  • They help people workout with easy in-app exercises to be in shape
  • Access to better treatment with doctor-patient communication
  • Easy access to health reports regarding patient’s health
  • Medical records are secured in an app and can be accessed 24/7
  • You can call for an emergency healthcare service whenever needed
  • Reminds to take medicine and do doctor visits
  • You can book doctors appointment right through the app

So you can why there are takers for healthcare apps. They literally make people’s life easier for those to keep their health at top priority. But despite these numerous benefits, healthcare apps are not garnering much success. Only 2 percent of all highly perpetuated medical healthcare app kickstarts.

But Why Most Healthcare Apps Fail?

Well, there are certain reasons why most healthcare apps fail to surpass or even reach the benchmark. Let’s talk about those in details.

1. Your healthcare app got rejected because of poor user experience

Healthcare apps need to have a simple user interface that delivers easy user experience. Your app page cannot look like it has been hit by a tornado. It cannot take an eternity to load. Whether it is about inappropriate content or a haphazard placement of app elements- make sure you take care of the app’s look and feel. A small CTA misplacement can make a huge difference in your app.

2. Lack of expertise in healthcare industry

It is quite obvious that if you choose a novice healthcare app developers team, they cannot deliver a remarkable product. For creating a serious healthcare app, you might need an expert team with hands-on specialization. Also, there would a doctor’s input needed at times to create the app better.

3. You didn’t identify a particular problem to solve

Creating a mHealth app involves understanding how users will use the app. Whether it is design or development, firstly understand what problems are you going to solve. A lot of startups aim to cover a lot of things and try to cure a lot of pain points at one go.

This ends up with a lot of things in the app, which increases the usage hassles. So, instead of covering every other problem you know, it’s better to think of something that actually solves a problem. If you have thought of developing a healthcare app that has a mobile view of a patient’s health data, it must have mobile-optimized functions. You also need to make sure users get their particular need/problem solved.

4. Are you even meeting the privacy guidelines?

Creating healthcare apps comes with a lot of responsibilities, regulations, and guidelines. And most of the apps in market fail to fulfill those. For example, HIPAA compliant is one of the most important regulations that is meant to be fulfilled. Few other guidelines are also there which needs to be maintained, according to the type of service you are catering.

Well, there are a lot of other issues which should get immediate attention. We can talk about those issues and work on them together. Moving on, let’s find out the top healthcare app types that are ruling the market.

Health And Fitness App That We Use Every day

You must have heard about Fitbits and health trackers used by almost everyone these days. These gadgets come with their specific apps that help in calculating the-

  1. Lost calories
  2. Number of steps walked
  3. Heartbeat rate
  4. Sleep tracker
  5. Medicine reminder
  6. Blood Pressure count etc.

With the help of experienced healthcare app developers, you can create an all in one health and fitness app that will take care of the user and provide accurate data. The ideal way to market these apps is by allowing a subscription-based model. OR you can create healthcare app with an individual feature from aforementioned list.  

Hospital, Clinic And EHR Apps For Patients

Though hospitals are a big entity and you might think apps cannot solve the underlying problems- hospital apps are quite useful at a lot of places. If you have a hospital app idea that you want to create, you need to start from scratch. Initially, you can ask your healthcare app developers to build a hospital app that helps in the branding.Additionally, you can have apps that help you get doctor’s appointment or do in-app payments for the treatment. It can have

  1. EMRs, with patient’s record history,
  2. Online access to available doctors in emergency,
  3. Option to order medicines via an app
  4. Push notification as calendar reminder to take medicines as prescribed etc.

EMR or Electronic Medical Records app, also known as EHR apps are yet another healthcare app variant. Here, users can have multiple choice of hospitals to choose from. They can get benefits from different hospital entities and have audio/video consultations with specialist doctors.

In addition, AI can help diagnose basic ailments and diseases. You can talk on this further with our expert healthcare app developers.

Revealing The Secret to A Successful Healthcare App Development

With more than 325K healthcare apps in the market, it is going to be tough for you to stand out. To make sure your app gets enough exposure, your app idea must resonate with your target audience. You must not keep any flaw that hinders a good response from your user. So in particular, what steps you need to follow to achieve a versatile and user-friendly healthcare app? Let’s go deep in details.

Identify A Problem That Needs Immediate Attention

As you dig deeper, you’ll get to know the exact pain points that the healthcare industry is facing. You will get to know what kind of features in your healthcare app can benefit patients or what problems hospitals are coping with. And ask yourself questions like, how your app can address the major challenges.

You might think that your app is useful but probably it just doesn’t solve anything. So, always go for an MVP, Minimum Viable Product launch before you actually finalize the features and launch your app.

What You Should Always Know Who Your Target Audience Is!

Your app idea must be consumer-driven. Period.

You gotta listen what users demand and solve their issues that creating a fancy app that gets lost in the sea of app stores. Your app must be engaging and engrossing for the end users. And this is only possible when you know who your end users are and what are there demands. In the sea of mHealth apps in play store, a minute percent of apps gets ‘actually’ utilized. Most apps lack the basic features useful for patients. So, make sure you carry out a detailed market analysis to know what does your end-user demand and how to develop those features.

So, get ahead of your user’s expectations.

Why You Should Design A Simple, Sustainable And Scalable Healthcare App

Experts say, when it comes to healthcare apps, do not fantasize something out of the box. You might think of exceptional design but it can fail to put up if the design is too complicated. So, don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to design. Ask your healthcare app developers to create a simple, intuitive and easy to use the framework. Hence, it would be easier to personalize and your brand and add new elements when required.Make sure whatever design improvement you make with each update, are added at the backend. This adds up to the scalability and the apps sustainability. Healthcare app developers that you hire should be able to configure your app in a way that it easily accommodate old and new users. Make sure your app doesn’t look outdated.

You Must Test Your App Rigorously

You cannot tell if you the app has got a good user experience, but you can immediately tell when it has a bad one. So, test your app rigorously. Whether it is about testing the features, production, app analytics, data improvisation etc- make sure you collect proper audit data and work on the issues.

What’s Your Take On Healthcare Application Development?

Mobile healthcare app development requires a lot of investment, expertise and hard work of healthcare app developers. So make sure your every penny invested counts. Talk with your hired healthcare app developers to work out on the plan. The healthcare application development process should streamline and work on the basis of user requirement. Make sure your developers understand that. So, do you have a healthcare app idea to discuss? Feel free to contact us. We’ll help you out.