According to analysts, the global healthcare software market is valued at $6.89 billion. It is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 28.4% over the next six years, reaching $50.94 billion by 2030.
This trend is explained by the global digitalization of modern society, as well as the numerous advantages offered by the use of innovative technologies in the healthcare industry.
If you want to effectively develop your medical business, it’s time to consider healthcare mobile application development. Learn about the features of this process and the characteristics of a reliable mobile healthcare app from the detailed guide by Lampa.dev.
Key Considerations in Medical App Development
Before contacting developers to create a medical app, it is important to clearly understand who your target audience is. This will allow you to identify their needs and implement the necessary functionality in your mHealth app.
Various population categories can use a medical application. The main users of such digital solutions include:
- Healthcare providers. They need a comprehensive product that will meet their main needs in clinic and staff management, patient communication, solving professional tasks, etc.
- Patients. Features that may be needed by visitors to medical facilities include the ability to schedule appointments with reminders, online access to medical records, and communication with medical professionals. A separate type of mobile healthcare application is digital solutions for IoT devices, which allow patients to monitor their health status outside hospital walls.
- Caregivers. They also need access to electronic health records, allowing them to understand diagnoses and medical prescriptions. IoT applications for patient condition monitoring are also frequently used.
Based on the above, it can be concluded that a good medical app must have extended functionality that meets the needs of your target audience.
Developing a health app that meets such a requirement will bring a number of advantages to all users of such digital solutions.
Benefits of Mobile Health Applications
Order the development of a medical mobile app and you will immediately notice increased customer satisfaction, improved productivity of your healthcare professionals, and naturally, a growth in revenue. All this is possible due to the advantages of mobile apps for the healthcare industry.
Improved Patient Interaction
Using a medical application enhances patient engagement in the healthcare process. Patients can manage their appointments with specialists and monitor their health status using software products for medical devices. Additionally, custom healthcare software helps patients adhere to medical prescriptions, ensuring they take their medications on time and attend procedures.
Such effective interaction with patients is key to improving the quality of medical services and, as a result, increasing patient trust.
Optimized Communication Between Patients and Medical Professionals
Patient and doctor communication is facilitated through telemedicine mobile apps, which support voice and video calls, among other features.
This software saves time for both patients and doctors, thereby increasing the number of patients served. Moreover, access to telemedicine ensures that patients seek timely consultations from specialists instead of self-medicating.
The accuracy of online consultations is also unquestionable. According to research from one clinic, the diagnoses made during in-person visits and video consultations matched in 86.9% of cases.
Access to Medical Information in Real-Time
Using a mobile healthcare application, anyone with the appropriate access can view a patient’s electronic health record in real-time.
This feature can be beneficial for all user categories. Patients and caregivers can refer to health information to follow prescriptions. Doctors use this data to monitor the disease's progress, and it is also useful when a patient transitions from one treating physician to another.
Want to experience all these benefits for your business? Interested in how to develop a medical app? Contact the professionals at Lampa.dev and elevate the medical service in your clinic to a new level.
Steps to Create a Medical App
Healthcare application development is a complex process that requires thorough preparation. Here are the main stages leading to a successful hospital app release.
So, how to make a medical app?
Market and Target Audience Research
Before creating a healthcare app, you need to conduct a thorough market analysis. This step will help identify the existing problems in the healthcare industry and outline optimal ways to solve them with an innovative software product.
An in-depth analysis of competitors will help identify the strengths of existing digital solutions on the market and incorporate them into your mobile healthcare app. At the same time, learning from the experience of other healthcare providers can help you avoid mistakes made in their applications.
Also, do not neglect the research of your target audience. To gather information about user preferences and expectations, you can conduct focus groups and study reviews of similar software products.
Defining Goals and Key Functions of the Medical Mobile App
Depending on the purpose of your app, you will determine the app type and its functionality. For example, if you need to organize clinic operations, ensure effective communication processes, manage medications, etc., you will need a comprehensive CRM system.
If you do not need a comprehensive solution, you can create a medical app with more limited capabilities—such as an app for IoT devices or one solely for patient appointment scheduling.
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Design
Statistics show that 81% of consumers will delete an app after a negative interaction experience. This underscores the importance of a well-thought-out, intuitive UX design. To achieve this, avoid overloading the medical application with too many features—ensure the user journey is logical and clear, from registration to completing the main tasks of the digital solution.
Do not underestimate the importance of UI design. For the app’s pages, it is crucial to choose corporate colors to make the program recognizable and a true business card for your clinic. Use familiar icons and buttons, and concise fonts.
Before developing the UI/UX design, the developer provides clients with a prototype of the future mobile healthcare app. This mockup clearly demonstrates how the product will look.
After receiving feedback from the client and making the necessary changes, you can proceed to the design development.
Developing the Medical App
So, we have determined the type of application and the main requirements for the digital product. The next step is to choose the right technology stack that will best suit the implementation of the idea. To develop a healthcare app, you need to select a programming language, framework, databases, API design tools, etc.
Depending on the features provided in the application, you will also need to decide on a payment service, push notification service, technology for streaming data transmission, and much more.
When all the tools and technologies are determined, app developers start working on the application. This process includes frontend development – creating the part of the app that users interact with, and backend development – creating the server side of the digital solution.
The key to successful product creation is the application of Agile methodology, which involves breaking down a large project into smaller components, continuous collaboration among all team members, and ongoing improvement of the digital solution. This approach also includes iterative testing.
Ensuring Compliance and Security
The digitization of the healthcare industry involves storing and processing a large amount of confidential data, including healthcare information protected by doctor-patient confidentiality.
To ensure a high level of personal information protection, the developer must use reliable data encryption technology, authentication, and authorization methods. It is also important to comply with HIPAA, GDPR, and other healthcare regulations.
Additionally, to timely identify vulnerabilities in healthcare software, it is important to regularly conduct penetration testing.
Testing the Medical App
Statistics show that 88% of users will stop using an app if they encounter errors. This clearly demonstrates the importance of the testing stage in healthcare mobile app development.
How to create a medical app that will work flawlessly and perform all implemented functions accurately? It is necessary to ensure a comprehensive QA process throughout the project. This involves conducting various types of testing at all stages of development:
- Functional testing. This type of testing checks that all functions of the digital solution work properly. Several types of functional testing include:
unit testing: verifying individual parts (modules) of the digital solution;
integration testing: checking combinations of several modules to evaluate their interaction quality;
system testing: assessing the performance of the entire application;
acceptance testing: verifying that the digital solution meets acceptance criteria, or in other words, is ready for release.
- Usability testing. These tests determine how user-friendly the software product is. Usability testing can also be of several types:
moderated and unmoderated: depending on whether users perform the testing independently or under the guidance of a coordinator;
in-person and remote: considering whether users are in the same physical location or different ones;
exploratory testing: users freely interact with the app to identify bugs;
comparative testing: comparing several versions of the product to determine the most convenient and understandable one.
- Security testing. As the name suggests, this type of testing assesses how secure the medical mobile app is. It involves a comprehensive set of tests, including:
vulnerability scanning: automated checking of the digital solution for vulnerabilities;
penetration testing: verifying the product by simulating hacker attacks;
security audit: a comprehensive check of the app, including source code evaluation and configuration analysis;
risk assessment: identifying potential risks associated with the digital solution;
ethical hacking: Deliberate attacks by ethical hackers to identify vulnerabilities;
SAST (Static Application Security Testing): analyzing the source code for vulnerabilities;
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing): analyzing running applications.
When the medical application is ready and all the above types of testing have been conducted, the final QA process is Beta Testing. It is conducted with a selected group of users to gather feedback.
Thorough testing of the mobile healthcare app is a crucial part of app development services, as it ensures a positive user experience and increases the digital solution’s popularity.
Launching and Promoting the Medical App
When the development and testing of the app are complete, it's time for the release. At this stage, it is advisable to develop an effective marketing strategy to ensure that users have access to information about the new product.
Depending on the type of solution created (iOS or Android), you need to choose the right platform for distribution — App Store or Google Play, respectively.
Features of a Successful Medical Application
According to Statista, there are over 54,500 medical applications available on Google Play alone. However, not all of them are successful with users. To reach the top of the most in-demand apps, a digital solution must have the following characteristics:
- User-Friendly Design. How to create a health app that becomes a favorite among your clients? Ensure the creation of a responsive, intuitive user interface.
- Integration with Healthcare Systems. Modern medical organizations use many systems and services in their work. When creating a new solution, consider all the healthcare software already in the clinic and ensure seamless integration with the new application.
- Real-Time Data Access and Communication Capabilities. The ability to quickly contact a treating physician and 24/7 access to health data are the main advantages of telemedicine over in-person visits to the clinic. Therefore, to keep your app relevant, implement these features.
Software development service providers strive to ensure that medical apps meet the above requirements. In the future, technology will continue to evolve, allowing for further digitization of the healthcare industry to achieve better outcomes.
The Future of Medical App Development
In the coming years, healthcare mobile app development will rapidly evolve. Developers will actively utilize innovative technologies and progressive tools to create digital solutions for automating processes in the healthcare industry.
Let's look at the trends emerging in healthcare application development:
- Use of Artificial Intelligence and Related Technologies. Medical applications increasingly use machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics. The main applications of these technologies include disease diagnosis, illness prevention, treatment planning, and patient communication.
- Growth in Telemedicine Popularity. Many patients prefer remote consultations over in-person visits to the clinic. Specialized software also simplifies the monitoring of patients' conditions outside medical facilities.
- Development of IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) Technology. Wearable devices perform numerous functions previously available only to humans. They allow for home monitoring of patient conditions, tracking vital signs in healthy individuals (e.g., during physical activities), and providing doctors with real-time health data.
- Implementation of Blockchain Technology. This technology facilitates the secure storage and exchange of data. As a result, patients and doctors can have continuous access to medical records and be confident in their security.
- Application of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). These technologies are widely used for training medical students and in surgery. For example, AR can create a computer hologram, allowing a doctor to see a complete picture of the patient's internal organs during an operation.
These trends positively influence the development of medicine. They contribute to:
increasing healthcare accessibility through online consultations and reducing the cost of medical services.
enhancing patient engagement by providing access to educational resources, enabling health monitoring, managing medication intake, and more.
improving treatment effectiveness by increasing diagnostic accuracy, enabling continuous monitoring of chronic patients, and predicting epidemics.
personalizing medical services through the development of individualized treatment plans considering patients' genetic characteristics and medical histories.
increasing healthcare system efficiency by automating routine tasks.
Developing a health app will allow you to carve out your niche in the healthcare sector and attract your target audience, surpassing numerous competitors.
Getting Started with Your Own Medical App
If you decide to use a progressive digital solution in your medical business, the best choice is to order a custom healthcare app.
Contact the experts at Lampa.dev for this purpose—we can develop a medical app tailored to your needs, incorporating all necessary functionalities.
Our team provides comprehensive development services, so you can be confident that you will receive a fully functional healthcare application that will start generating profits immediately.