Healthcare Application Development: The Essentials
In recent years, the use of mobile healthcare applications has become incredibly popular. People love tracking their activity levels and blood pressure, connecting to medical providers, and receiving lab results. And this is far from a complete list! In recent years, online health assesments and consultations between doctors and patients have reached their climax! According to a recent Insider Intelligence survey, nearly two-thirds (63.4%) of US consumers have used an app for health-related purposes in the past 12 months. Besides, the telemedicine application market will reach $17.14 billion by 2026. Thus, this industry is up-and-coming for businesses.
Yojji has extensive experience in building healthcare applications, and we have a team of professionals with relevant knowledge. In this article, we will talk about the features of healthcare projects and give tips for software engineers on developing an effective healthcare application.
Types of Healthcare Apps
So, what’s a health app? It's a multifunctional mobile application that diagnoses, monitors, or treats disease. There are several types of healthcare applications; however, in the general concept, they are developed for use by both patients and doctors.
Doctor applications support easier observation of the patients, planning of appointments, and even sharing knowledge. Apps for patients educate users, allow them to arrange online consultations, get treatment recommendations, monitor health conditions, remind them to take medicines, make appointments, and communicate with people with similar problems. Besides, these applications encourage healthy living and provide mental health support.
How to Develop a Healthcare App
Any development process starts with a market analysis and goal setting. Once this stage is completed, you can carry out a project implementation. Below, we will briefly describe the main steps.
1. Determine the challenges Identify any challenges you may face; these include strong competitors, implementation of the necessary features, and compliance with certain rules and regulations.
2. Identify your buyer persona A successful healthcare app is a digital solution that is as personalized as possible and solves all user problems. The more thoroughly you analyze your target audience, the more likely you are to develop a competitive app. Analyze the location, gender, age, interests, and income of potential end-users.
3. Decide on the tech stack
The solutions stack you use depends on the platform you choose. Here is a brief overview of the most popular technology infrastructure.
Compliance to Consider in Health App Development
Medical application development is a challenging process, but there’s one thing all development teams need to prioritize at all costs. Any medical application, due to the nature of its use, presupposes following legal regulations concerning patients’ data safety. This is why, when developing a similar app, teams involved need to consider these laws to ensure data is safe and sound.
USA
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Health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA) Applications must comply with HIPAA since they store protected health information. This act contains measures to protect PHI data and ensure no private information has been leaked. This is why this act must be taken into account during the process of healthcare app development.
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Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) Holds providers accountable for disclosing breaches. It also expands the privacy and security regulations for the transmission of patient information that were part of HIPAA.
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California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) Residents are fully aware of what’s up with their information. They can demand to know what data providers are collecting.
European Union
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General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Residents are entitled to know what data is gathered, and how it is shared. They can request that it be deleted entirely under this regulation.
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Data Protection Law Enforcement Directive (LED) As implied by its name, the LED allows data controllers to process personal data for "law enforcement purposes" that are not covered by the GDPR.
Canada
- PIPEDA - Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act Controls private companies that collect, utilize, or reveal personal data. It establishes a person's right to access their data and the ability to contest its correctness.
Yojji Experience
At Yojji, we have expertise in building healthcare applications from scratch, and Smart Health is one of our cases.
This application is designed to provide timely remote medical consultations and various surveys. As one of the healthcare application developers, we’ve decided to share thought-provoking tidbits concerning healthcare application development.
1. Create maximum personalization It is crucial to realize that users want maximum comfort, so the app must integrate into the users’ daily lives. It should take into account health conditions, habits, tastes, and dynamic factors. One way to personalize the app is to integrate special tools (surveys and chatbots).
2. Add a patient community feature According to a study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, providing a social platform to patients is a powerful way to enhance healthy behaviors. More than 56% of the 217 users surveyed found that the social feature in-app increased their belief that other people wanted them to lead a healthy routine. Oftentimes, people with similar diseases feel the need to interact with each other. By utilizing this feature, they will communicate and get a sense of support and safety.
3. Integrate the app with wearable devices According to Dr. Najafi, a director of the Interdisciplinary Consortium on Advanced Motion Performance (iCAMP) at Baylor and co-director of the Center to Stream HealthCare in Place, “Remote care using telehealth and wearables has become a critical part of health operations during the pandemic and is expected to continue being a robust tool for providers and patients”. The wearable device collects data about a person’s health status (heart rate, saturation, blood sugar levels, physical activity, and sleep patterns), and the data will be transferred to the app, allowing patients to gain greater control over their health.
Bottom Line
Thus, creating a healthcare app can be a daunting task, but if the devs have enough experience and expertise, a healthcare application will be a competitive and profitable solution. Yojji specialists are ready to tackle your business challenges and bring the most daring ideas to life. Contact us for further details.
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