Healthcare Application Development: A Detailed Guide for 2024

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Increased digitalization across various industries affected the healthcare sector as well. Now, the integration of telehealth, remote patient monitoring systems, mHealth apps, and other types of medical software drive the overall healthcare software market:

• According to Precedence Research, the global healthcare SaaS market was $32.6 billion in 2022 and would approach $80 billion by 2030.
• Following Data Bridge Market Research, the global healthcare information software market was $22.6 billion in 2021 and would surpass $53 billion by 2029.

Drawing on these stats, healthcare organizations increasingly invest in medical app development, aiming for better patient monitoring, health data management, hospital administration, and more. Thus, if you wonder how to create a health app, you’re probably from such organizations.

Fortunately, Acropolium has prepared a comprehensive guide on healthcare app development for you. We’ll discuss the types of healthcare software, must-have features, and benefits for doctors and patients, leveraging our extensive expertise in delivering top-notch medical software solutions.

What Is Healthcare App Development?

Healthcare application development includes specialized software solutions that serve various users, namely healthcare organizations, doctors, and patients. These applications aim to improve the overall medical care quality and facilitate healthcare operations management.

Health app development is a versatile process, given the number of software solutions you can build. Read on to learn more about the types of medical software applications.

Main Types of Healthcare Applications

Medical application development has grown to a significant extent. We can see numerous apps on the software market, helping healthcare professionals with the proper health services delivery, medical facilities with better management, and, of course, patients with improved health monitoring. Let’s look at the main categories of apps you can develop.

Healthcare Application Software Types Explained

As already mentioned, healthcare apps can assist various user types. Following that, we can divide the medical software into the following categories:

Healthcare Apps for Doctors

These software solutions help streamline physicians’ work. They allow for efficient doctor-patient communication, remote patient treatment, health records monitoring, etc.

Healthcare Apps for Staff

In this case, we’re talking about solutions that benefit the employees of medical facilities beyond doctors. Such apps may assist in hospital and inventory management, billing, EHR administration, etc.

Healthcare Apps for Patients

Health apps for patients do not necessarily require doctors’ involvement and usually serve as self-help applications. They provide educational information, lifestyle tracking, wellness features, etc.

Professional Healthcare Apps for Doctors

Let’s look at the core types of medical software applications for doctors. These include:

• Doctor appointment apps. They enable patients to book online meetings with doctors. Physicians, in turn, can manage their schedules conveniently.
• Electronic medical/health records apps. Such solutions allow doctors to collect, store, and manage patients’ health information through a single platform.
• Medical reference apps. With them, doctors get up-to-date information on treatment strategies and recent medical studies using data from highly-trusted sources.
• Medical prescription apps. These applications allow doctors to create e-prescriptions and send those to their patients, leveraging the virtual assistant on the appropriate dosage and period of drug administration.
• Remote patient monitoring systems. Doctors can monitor their patients remotely on these platforms as they collect real-time health data from IoT-enabled wearable devices.
• Medical networking apps for doctors. They connect doctors with their colleagues online to facilitate career growth and decision-making.
• Telemedicine apps. These applications provide audio and video communication means to connect doctors and patients remotely.

Healthcare Apps for Staff

Consider the most common healthcare apps that are helpful to the medical staff and facilities.

• Doctor/nurse marketplace. It is a staffing platform for healthcare professionals that collects job offers and connects medical staff with employers.
• EMR/EHR. It is a database that stores all patients’ health and medical records that are easy to access through a single platform.
• Inventory management system. This software allows healthcare staff to track medical products, equipment, and inventory availability in the hospital.
• Billing systems. These solutions streamline the billing process within the hospital, covering such operations as accounting, payment processing, and claims management.
• Practice management apps. They allow medical staff to organize their work more efficiently, offering automation of certain operations.
• Hospital enterprise resource planning systems. The hospital app development creation involves providing information on the hospital’s core operations, including financials, inventory, patient, and staff management.

Healthcare Apps for Patients

Let’s now find out what healthcare application software is there. Here are the main types:

• Appointment scheduling and reminders. These healthcare apps for patients provide timely information on doctor visits and allow for appointment booking.
• Health monitoring apps. These apps have symptom checking, treatment recommendations, and various notifications and reminders.
• Healthy lifestyle and dieting apps. These applications provide patients with a healthy lifestyle and dieting recommendations, help track progress, and set goals.
• Telehealth apps. These doctor patient apps help patients visit their physicians online via audio or video conferencing features.
• Diagnosis apps for preventive purposes. Medical diagnosis apps allow patients to enter their symptoms for self-diagnosis of diseases.
• Fitness and wellness apps. These applications feature activity tracking, provide physical and mental exercises for patients, and promote a healthy lifestyle by offering challenges and goal setting.

Healthcare App MVP: Features List

Medical app development requires determining the application type and its core functionalities. Let’s look at the MVP features that any medical app should have.

Registration

Web and mobile app development for healthcare should include the registration feature. It allows doctors and patients to set up their accounts, where they’ll store all necessary health information. Enable email sign-up and registration via social media, and secure your app with two-factor authentication.

Profile Management

Healthcare app developers should also consider what comes up after the registration process. They should feature profile editing capabilities and the ability to transfer EHR information.

Patient Dashboard

Include this feature when developing a healthcare app so that doctors can conveniently view all information on their patients in charts, tables, and diagrams.

Telemedicine

Communication is significant in medical apps development. Enable audio and video conferencing features to provide patients and doctors with remote connectivity.

Messaging

Integrate this feature into your healthcare application so doctors and patients can swiftly exchange messages and share updates.

Notifications and Reminders

This feature is necessary for web and mobile health app development to ensure that patients and doctors don’t miss appointments, take medication on time, and stay posted on treatment updates.

Calendar and Appointment Scheduling

Integrate a calendar into your healthcare app so patients and doctors can manage and schedule appointments.

Payment Processing

Payment processing is another feature to consider for health application development. Using this functionality, patients will pay for medical services right in your app.

Things to Consider for Medical App Development

Healthcare application development is a specific niche, and there are particular requirements you must fulfill before building your app. Your main concerns may include data security, regulatory compliance, interoperability, and medical equipment integration. Let’s delve into these issues in greater detail.

Data Security

Since medical app development involves collecting and managing sensitive patient data, top-notch security is your primary consideration. On top of that, your application will probably handle payments, which is another area of safety concern.

Here’s how you can minimize data security risks in your healthcare app:

• Ensure end-to-end encryption
• Enable multi-factor authentication
• Introduce a log-in expiration policy

Healthcare Industry Regulations

Your software must meet specific regulatory requirements depending on the location where you provide healthcare app development services. The legal regulations mostly concern patient data security. So before building a medical application, check the regulatory requirements in your area. Some of those include:

• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If you develop a healthcare app for the US market, it should comply with this law that ensures protected healthcare information (PHI) security.
• California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). It is a law for the residents of California that enhances privacy rights.
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It is a data protection law that applies to the European Union countries.
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This law provides rules for the data security of medical apps in the US.
• Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. This law focuses on EHR data security in the US.
• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This regulation forbids discrimination against people with disabilities in the US.
• Data Protection Act (DPA). This regulation provides data security and privacy standards in the UK.
• Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). This data security regulation applies to healthcare apps in Canada.

Interoperability

Your other consideration on how to develop a healthcare app should include interoperability. It involves figuring out how to ensure seamless data transfer between all platforms and devices connected to your system including healthcare mobile applications. Currently, the most viable way to do this is through APIs, some of which include:

• Apple Health Records. You can connect your healthcare application with this API to gather information on critical patient health parameters.
• Google Cloud Healthcare. You can use this API for clinical data management.

Medical Equipment Integration

Integrating medical equipment is another part of web and mobile health application development. Your healthcare app can receive real-time data from medical devices if you develop an API for remote access. Here are some assets you may integrate your app with:

• Sugar level sensors
• Electrocardiographs
• Tonometers
• Pulsimeters
• Pacemakers

Benefits of Medical Software Applications

Healthcare apps help streamline doctors’ work, facilitate hospital management, and improve the patient experience. Look at the other medical app development benefits you can get.

Benefits for Doctors and Hospitals

Doctors and medical facilities get numerous advantages from hospital app development, and the main of them include:

• Automation of multiple healthcare-related processes
• Improved workload distribution
• Efficient health data management
• Better decision-making
• More precise patient diagnosis
• Enhanced communication of hospital staff
• Better equipment maintenance and inventory management
• Reduced healthcare services expenses

Benefits for Patients

Patients benefit from custom healthcare software development as well. Here are the main advantages:

• Better medical care
• Improved accessibility of medical services
• Enhanced control over patient’s health data
• Reduced medical care costs
• Secure payments

Healthcare App Development Step-by-Step

App development healthcare differs from other industries. There are various intricacies to take care of before building your health application. So how to create a medical app? Go through this process step-by-step.

Step 1. Find Reliable Healthcare App Developers

Answering your question about how to develop a medical app, you should first and foremost find a reliable software vendor. Such web and mobile healthcare app developers will leverage their extensive expertise to help you come up with the application’s functionality and vision.

Step 2. Choose Your App Type

Web and mobile healthcare software development also involves defining the app type you aim to create. Choose the one that reflects your ideas best, decide on the features, and determine the app’s core purpose.

Step 3. Cover Your App’s UI/UX Design

At this stage, when you have devised your healthcare app concept, your designers may work on the UI/UX. The main idea of how to develop a health app is to make it user-friendly and intuitive as it will most likely serve users of various backgrounds and technical savvy.

Step 4. Ensure Regulatory Compliance

As you already know, app development for healthcare necessitates compliance with various regulations. So make sure your application follows HIPAA, GDPR, or any other legal requirements.

Step 5. Build MVP

Finally, you can handle healthcare Android app development or build an iOS application with all the necessary features. You can then launch it and test it among users for future improvements.

Medical App Development Companies: How to Choose

Suppose you need a healthcare management system. In this case, you can buy a SaaS solution or opt for custom healthcare software development services. If you decide to build your application from scratch, you may require a reliable vendor for that job. But how to choose a suitable healthcare app development company? Here are some tips:

• Weight your project requirements, including must-have features, tech stack, and timelines
• Research offshore healthcare app developer rates
• Decide on a software development pricing model

Thus, selecting the best healthcare app development company involves understanding your requirements thoroughly.

Why Choose Acropolium as Your Healthcare Application Development Company?

Acropolium is an experienced medical app developer with numerous successful projects in the healthcare industry. Our agency leverages over a decade of expertise to guarantee ISO-certified processes, GDPR compliance, and robust healthcare mobile applications and web platforms.

Upon becoming our partner, Acropolium’s dedicated team can provide you with the following medical app development services:

• Custom healthcare platform development
• Bespoke healthcare mobile app development
• Cloud-based healthcare software development
• Legacy healthcare system modernization

On top of that, our best healthcare app developers can build various medical app types. Some of those include:

• Hospital management systems
• Remote patient monitoring apps
• Telehealth solutions
• Healthcare chatbots
• Medical prescription apps
• EHR/EMR systems
• Pharmacy apps
• And many more

Read on to discover our healthcare app development portfolio and ensure our verified expertise.

Acropolium Case Studies in Healthcare App Development

Acropolium has a reputation as a trustworthy and professional medical mobile app development company and bespoke software vendor, as seen in the projects we deliver.

HIPAA-Compliant Medical App Development

Our task on this project was to deliver a HIPAA-compliant medical application. Acropolium’s top healthcare app developers conducted a complete audit to tackle issues with technical documentation absence, improved the code quality, and optimized the application for further scaling.

Our collective efforts resulted in a 40% IT budget reduction, a 56% delivery time decrease, and a 38% boost in customer loyalty.

Kiosk Software Development for Pharmacy Kiosks

During this project, our team mastered how to develop healthcare app for pharmacy kiosks. We built custom software and integrated it with kiosk devices and third-party tools. The delivered app works in real time with zero failures, growing the pharmacy’s profits by 60%, boosting sales by 47%, and increasing customer loyalty by 54%.

Veterinary Telemedicine Platform Development

During this project, our developers had to optimize the existing on-demand veterinary application. Our task was to integrate a suitable third-party video chatting solution, improve the web interface and mobile app, and implement new features.

Upon these tasks’ completion, we increased pet product sales by 44%, grew the number of new users by 67%, and boosted customer loyalty by 37%.

Addiction Recovery Mobile App Development

Another project we worked on was a cross-platform addiction recovery application. We engaged in medical iPhone app development that also works for Android users, including features like connection with doctors, mini drug tests, and alcohol and drug library. We delivered this app in four months, reducing the development budget by 40%.

Dental Clinic Mobile App Development

It is a project of our internal R&D department. Our team suggested building an application connecting dentists and patients and updating patients on their treatment plans online. As a doctor appointment app development company, we also added patient visit cards feature and integrated health records.

Biotech Enterprise SaaS Development for Remote Device Management and Quality Control System

This project involved building a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) for remote device management. We also had to automate workflow and enhance client-to-client and client-to-vendor communication.

Our team not just tackled these tasks but demonstrated significant results. Improved communication helped attract 30% more customers, and our software solution facilitated a 65% sales and 75% client loyalty increase.

Final Thoughts

The digitalization trend dictates new rules for healthcare organizations. As a result, medical facilities increasingly invest in health software development to offer better care and stay competitive.

We hope that today’s guide has explained how to build a medical app to you. Probably the best way to do so is to delegate this task to professionals like Acropolium. We offer subscription-based software development services for a reasonable IT outsourcing cost, using which you’ll get a top-notch healthcare app in the shortest time. Feel free to contact us for more details.

Sources of Information

1. https://www.precedenceresearch.com/
2. https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/