Doctor Appointment App Development: Features, Tech Stack, And Cost

With the advent of worldwide influence and shifting societal values, technological development is accelerating the transformation of the healthcare industry. Today we can clearly see which parts of health care delivery have failed and are shown to be vulnerable.

Making an appointment with a doctor in a few clicks online is one of the solutions that, in our opinion, can make a difference in the interaction between a doctor and a patient.

We believe medtech's innovation is a giant leap forward in healthcare reform that can improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare services.

At Softermii, we have in-depth expertise in developing mHealth applications, telemedicine software to help healthcare organizations reveal their full potential. Led by our domain experience, we prepared a useful guide on design and development of an online doctor appointment system.

So, let's discuss all the details about custom doctor appointment app development.

34.3% of appointments booked through online platforms were scheduled when the office was closed, at a time when there would have been no one there to accept a phone call.

Doctor Scheduling Software Market Overview

According to a forecast published by Statista, the mobile health app market is expected to surpass US $ 50 billion in 2025. No doubt these numbers indicate a steady increase in the development of solutions for the delivery of health services. What’s more, according to a recent survey, 43% of patients prefer to book appointments online, and 57% of consumers go online when searching for a new healthcare provider.

Zocdoc-like app development is the option to book a doctor's appointment online plays an important role when choosing medical services. It should not be unreasonable to assume that all of these numbers will continue to grow exponentially in the future, considering the popularity of this feature in the post-COVID-19 times.

It works simply: when you have the opportunity to make an appointment with a doctor online, you know that you will receive effective and fast medical care. Not to mention the other benefits that can be obtained for both the patient and the doctor. Let’s explore them in detail.

Benefits of Doctor Appointment App for Patients and Physicians

Well, you now know what a doctor's appointment app is, what main options they offer, and why you need to start to care about implementing this solution. But now, let's cover more specific points on why the simple option to book a doctor online can impact your medical practice incrementally.

Using the Doctor on Demand platform brings significant benefits to every part of the process. Let’s detail each of them and learn more about the benefits of medical office scheduling software.

Value for patients

When we look into the point of doctor appointment booking system development, cost-effectiveness and safety is the first that comes to mind. Using such an application, patients can reduce the number of hospital visits through remote interaction. This leads to less susceptibility to various diseases, as well as saving time and money on costly trips. With a more user-friendly doctor appointment app, patients are open to many useful options such as integration with calendars, online access to any doctor in any specialty, and ease of use for scheduling appointments.

For instance, when an app handles the logistics issues, it absolutely saves time for the patients because they can quickly and easily schedule medical appointments online. The system synchronizes automatically with everyone's calendar, sends reminders on upcoming visits, and even can send a notification if some time slot was canceled so that other patients can book it instantly.

Read more: Hospital Cybersecurity Checklist: 10 core steps that you need to check now

Value for doctors

From a physician's point of view, a simple work schedule is like a magic pill when dealing with a large number of patients. 24/7 patient access from any device significantly reduces the organizational burden on doctors.

Doctors can better manage consultations this way. They can keep track of cancellations so that doctors will have a better chance of seeing one of their other patients if someone backs out of an appointment at the last minute. So this kind of medical app can optimize doctor workload and avoid unused time slots that are truly cost-saving.

At the same time, it helps expand the patient base and streamline consultations. Furthermore, if the doctor booking app is integrated with the telemedicine platform, this Medtech solution can expand medical practice online and consult even more patients remotely. You may find an interesting article on the cost of telemedicine systems. The feature of recently canceled visits' notification again decreases the unused doctor working time rate while the patients who need urgent consultation can get it faster.

So, the doctor-patient appointment system brings more than convenience for doctors. Automation can streamline many operational and billing processes for greater efficiency and profitability.

Slava Ivanov

Global IT partnerships and Strategic development

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Value for hospitals

Doctor booking app development like zocdoc has already proven to many healthcare organizations and hospitals the tremendous potential this doctor booking system can offer. In addition to financial opportunities and efficiency gains, hospitals and clinics can improve many components of healthcare organizations with these applications.

For instance, the working hours of administrative staff are also reduced when these sorts of apps are in place, driving down the overhead for clinics, hospitals, etc.

Scheduling software helps avoid a lot of manual work, errors, and salary payoff when a booking is made by staff. Thus the employee time might be spent more effectively on other tasks when appointment scheduling is automated.

In other words, it results in easy shifts and workload management and simplifies the work of reception. An app is also useful for tracking revisits and improving clinic-patient communication. As a result, receptionists can get less hassle when confirming, canceling, or rescheduling appointments. Furthermore, 34.3% of appointments booked through online platforms were scheduled when the office was closed, at a time when there would have been no one there to accept a phone call.

More Accessible Healthcare With Online Booking & Video Conferencing Of Medical Consultation

A medical appointment scheduling software also helps patients and doctors become more comfortable in scenarios that are rapidly growing more commonplace, such as medical video conferencing software development. For instance, patients might be immobile, but they can still consult with their doctor from home if they have the app and a smartphone or tablet.

The integration of a custom support platform can also be a significant help to patients. They usually appreciate the ability to make online payments rather than having to call a doctor's office with their credit card information or send a check through the mail. It means a higher ROI for the hospital, clinic, or whatever another medical entity is in play.

The Main Doctor Appointment App Features That You Need to Have

After reading all the benefits and ways of monetizing doctor's visits scheduling software, you've decided that the time has come to develop a doctor appointment app, then there are some points you need to keep in mind.

Any medical application needs to have core mhealth app features that solve the main users' problems. Samely doctor appointment app should also have some specific features of the online doctor appointment system to meet the users' expectations. Let's reveal what they are:

Scheduling

In the doctor appointment scheduling app development, a scheduling feature must be kept in mind. This core feature allows patients to book a doctor’s appointment. A few taps on the screen - and a free space in the doctor's calendar is reserved for an appointment at a clinic or hospital.

Patient Profile

As for the patient profiles, they should include personal information so that doctors can come to the meeting prepared in any case. Document uploading and scanning capabilities would undoubtedly come in handy. Doctors should review patient health and demographics data.

Doctor Profile

Before booking a meeting, the patient should be able to choose the most suitable candidate among different healthcare professionals. There must be a doctor module specifically designed for creating and editing a profile. There should be available data such as the doctor's specialty, their location, photos of them, patient reviews, and what they charge for an appointment under different insurance providers.

It would be great to have real-time analytics for doctors and reports on the status of their medical practice. The doctor might also use this to put up some marketing and promotional items if that's something that they want to provide.

Reviews

The rating system in the clinic appointment scheduling software allows patients to leave comments and help others review recommendations. This app feature also indicates reliability and legitimacy and can help other patients choose a suitable clinic or medical practice experience in relation to this.

Calendar

A doctor appointment management app should feature as its bedrock online and offline booking capabilities that are intuitive and always work right the first time. You should have appointment status features and a fully functioning calendar like the one below:

Reminders & Notifications

Your physician scheduling software should also have fully functioning appointment email, phone, or app reminders and push notifications so that no appointment will ever be missed.

Live chat with support

In-app chat is an absolutely expected feature from the patients’ side. Physicians must be available on HD video platforms with chat access and 24/7 support.

Payment integrations

Several payment options are required for systematic interaction in the relationship between the health care provider and the patient. A credit card, debit card, or e-wallet is highly recommended for managing appointments efficiently and making payments automatically. A secure payment gateway like Stripe, Paypal, Klarna, etc. gives your users more flexibility and allows them to more securely pay for scheduled consultations directly through the app.

Telemedicine

Consider integrating telemedicine functionality for the care of patients living in rural areas. An ability to conduct online consultations via built-in chat or video-calling is vital in the doctor appointment booking app development. You will be able to reach more patients who cannot visit the clinic for any reason. Besides, video conferencing solutions can be based on WebRTC, or VidRTC technologies, which are fully GDPR and HIPAA compliant and are useful tools to support online meetings with EHR integration.

Read our guide on how to to build a custom healthcare app and what is the cost of telehealth implementation.

EHR

EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems are also critical to integrate into your online medical appointment booking system development process. This feature allows physicians online access to view documented patient history. It also increases the productivity of doctors and allows clinics and doctors to write safer prescriptions.

E-prescriptions

Doctor appointment scheduler software should have a way for a doctor to prescribe a needed medicine along with receipts directly in the app. Then the patient will be able to order the prescriptions from your local pharmacy or whatever they choose.

Medical tips

By enabling this option, your application can gain the trust of patients. Thus, they will see the progress of treatment and access the test results uploaded by their doctors.

How to Build a Doctor Appointment App for Your Clinic: 6 Crucial Steps

When it comes to the stage of designing doctor office scheduling software or an app, there is no silver bullet to immediately achieve the expected results. Regarding the difficulties that you may face, we recommend you pay attention to 6 steps that will help you make this process easier.

1. Ensure your doctor database is ready

Before the process of on-demand clinic appointment app development is launched, think of your product itself. Here, you will understand your app is a marketplace and the doctors and the services are your primary product. Thus, it is critical to ensure you have the product and a reliable database of professional doctors. At this stage, you decide if you will work with specific clinics and how to access their database through the healthcare API..

2. Conduct user research

Before prototyping an online doctor appointment app interface, you should obtain the critical user's data. This will help you understand the main characteristics of your target audience, both geographic and psychological. By analyzing the received data, you will determine exactly how your users will interact with your application.

3. Develop and test a prototype

The next step is to develop visuals of all screens in your doctor visit app. Once your clickable prototype is ready, you can test all of its features. Based on the feedback received from your healthcare staff and potential users, it will be easier to navigate the design and development of online doctor appointment systems in the UI / UX. To do this, you can choose any option from the existing prototyping tools, such as Invision, Adobe XD, Figma or Sketch.

4. Plan app functionality

To make your doctor appointment booking application's interface intuitive and user-friendly, think about the functionality of your application so that all considerations are taken into account at once and implemented in a high-quality and reliable application.

5. Design clear navigation

The crucial step of any product design is planning clear navigation. Your app will deal with life and death issues. Thus, it is important to offer clinicians and clients convenience and speed of use. All information should be quickly and easily accessible. Note that proper navigation improves the user experience.

6. Choose visuals, colors and fonts appropriately

Another step that requires special attention is the choice of visual elements during the development of the user interface of your application. A clean layout and minimalist style are what you should rely on when designing a doctor appointment booking system. Your designers team should understand the color palette should be associated with warmth and calmness. Typography should also be user-friendly, allowing users to easily and quickly distinguish text and find the information they need.

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Doctor Appointment App Tech Stack

The tech stack when you want to build an application for doctor appointments may vary greatly depending on the complexity of the project, the number of features, team composition, etc. Though the technologies used may be different, the basic tech stack is as follows:

• Front-end development: Angular, ReactJS
• Back-end development: Node.js, PHP, Phyton; database - Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB
• Mobile development: Android - Java, iOS - Swift
• Multiple payment modes: Braintree, PayPal, Stripe
• Map integration and user location tracking: Google Maps API, MapKit, CoreLocation
• Push notifications: Push.io, Twilio
• In-app video calling and messaging: Twilio, WebRTC, VidRTC.
• Cloud environment: Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure.

With regard to the immense role of video conferencing and messaging functions, which are essential for all healthcare applications, we would like to highlight technologies such as WebRTC and VidRTC. Using them, you will develop features twice faster.

These technologies are ready to implement mechanisms applicable to various niches and can manage virtual rooms that can support over 1000 people with media servers. Click here to find out more.

82% of customers experienced telemedicine for the first time since the start of Covid-19.

Challenges Developing a Custom Doctor Appointment Application

Data security

As with any medical apps, to protect personal data, custom doctor appointment solutions need to follow regulations regarding data security, such as HL7, HIPAA, GDPR and European health laws and statutes. Choose tools that adhere to these strict guidelines to avoid potential pitfalls.

HL7

HL7 is a set of international rules for exchanging and transferring data between various healthcare providers. Compared to other methods, patient health data can be transferred easily and securely in the doctor appointment app.

Read more: HL7 Integration: A Healthcare Standard Overview

HIPAA

HIPAA protects patients' rights and medical records. It also defines the appropriate security measures and ensures the security of protected health information.

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is applicable to any field dealing with personal data. It is the toughest privacy and security law drafted by the European Union (EU) and governs data processed in the healthcare sector.

Accessible design

To meet its goals, doctor appointment apps should be easy-to-use and seamless in adoption. The learning curve should be minimized, considering that the doctor appointment app will be used by different age categories and people with different technical backgrounds.

Integrations

Nowadays, the healthcare technology ecosystem may consist of several devices and various solutions. Making your custom doctor appointment app as useful as possible may require integrating numerous internal systems (medical, financial, reporting, CRMs, etc.) and third-party ones (e.g., insurance) in a trusted, secure manner. So, the integration of vastly different technologies and platforms is very important.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Doctor Appointment App?

The cost of online doctor appointment booking software development may vary depending on several factors:

• number of features;
• tech stack;
• team composition;
• third-party API integrations;
• deadlines, etc.

The cost of developing a doctor appointment app is negligible when you think about how many people are likely to use it in the months and years to come. Just as in many other fields, if this is something that you neglect to do, you're going to be left behind.

Besides, if you follow the tips that we've mentioned, you can mitigate some of the associated costs. You'll have a tool that should help you achieve a level of ROI for your medical business that you likely never dreamed was possible. The time and money that you put into online consultation app development is not something that you're ever going to regret.

However, there are specific stages in the online doctor scheduling app development.

Discovery phase, estimation & UI/UX design

Time: 280 hours

Cost: $8 400

During the research stage, our business analysts research the market, explore customers' expectations and evaluate industry demands. All information obtained by our business analysts serves as the baseline to estimate the budget of software project to agree with our clients.

When starting creating UI of the application and UX prototypes, we can assess how well the chosen technology stack, features, and overall aesthetics will meet the client's expectations. After all, we agree with the client on usability and screen design features and move on to the core medical appointment app.

Doctor Appointment App Development stage

Time: 640 hours

Cost: $25 600

During the core doctor appointment mobile app development phase, our development team uses the previously chosen tech stack to start building an early version of a fully-fledged product.

Testing & Launch

Time: 240 hours

Cost: $6 480

The testing phase is especially important for collecting user feedback and improving the functionality of the application to make it more user-friendly and to ensure that the product functions correctly.

After QA specialists complete their work and stress testing, unit testing, and security testing, and all application enhancements have been implemented, your application is finally ready to go to market. It also requires post-release support to add new features and stay ahead of the competition.

Writing technical documentation

Time: 40 hours

Cost: $1 600

This step is necessary to create a single document that includes all the information and instructions for your product.

Let's summarize our considerations in a summary table below.

#	Stages	Time	Cost
1	Estimation, Research & UI/UX design	280 hours	$8 400
2	Development	640 hours	$25 600
3	Testing	240 hours	$6 480
4	Creating technical documentation	40 hours	$1 600
	Total	1 200 hours (5 month)	$42 080

However, the average cost of the ready-to-use tailor-made doctor appointment app varies between $40 000 and $80 000. Contact us to get your project's cost precise calculations.

Successful doctor appointment app use cases

Hence, knowing the benefits of Building an online doctor appointment system, let's look at building this software as a way of investment that you can monetize shortly in the future.

Check popular doctor appointment booking solutions that exist these days, such as ZocDoc HealthTap, Practo and Doctolib. You'll see the many ways that these sorts of apps are beneficial for both the patients and the medical professionals who use them. An appointment app is a way of monetizing doctor on-demand solutions that is tough to ignore. Let’s consider each example in detail.

ZocDoc

Founded in 2007, ZocDoc is a marketplace where doctors offer their services and patients take three steps to arrange their meetings with physicians. ZocDoc uses AI to help patients find doctors in over 50 specialties. One of the notable features is that patients can scan their insurance plans and match providers that cover such treatments. This app offers Web and native mobile apps for iOS and Android.

HealthTap

Founded in 2007, HealthTap has an app available to patients on subscription. This app allows patients to schedule appointments with doctors through video calls or live chat. The company also offers a paid B2B telemedicine solution to doctors, insurance companies, and some products for employees. HealthTap can be launched online or in dedicated mobile applications.

Practo

Founded in 2008, Practo has five million downloads on Google Play. Such popularity is raised by offering a greater value to its users. This app enables patients to see their doctors online, upload prescriptions, set pill reminders, schedule physicals, and order medication. Practo covers all web platforms and mobile platforms.

To know more on this topic, read our articles on how to use AI, AR & VR, and Blockchain in healthcare.

Doctolib

French unicorn Doctlib was founded in 2013. Its website and app allow users to book medical appointments, provide the possibility of telemedicine visits, payments, doctors’ and patients’ profiles, and other administrative tools, depending on the type of subscription. Doctolib currently operates in France, Germany, and Italy with 300 000 practitioners and 60 million people using it so far — most of them have interacted with the service to book an appointment.

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Softermii Experience in Doctor Consultation App Development

Given our proven track record with this theme, we suggest you take a look at Medrealtime. It is a platform facilitating better access to healthcare from anywhere and anytime. It allows patients to choose physicians depending on their skills, experience, and reviews and has real-time video consultations, appointments scheduling, and reminders for doctors and patients.

HIPAA Telmed is a new web-based communication and video-conferencing application. It includes all necessary features for the doctor and patient to manage their interactions. Our developer team paid special attention to encoder implementations, browser support, and effective echo cancellation, creating a leading video-streaming solution.

You can book a meeting with the Softermii specialist and discuss your project to develop a custom doctor's appointment app.

Final thoughts

So, if you get some questions on building a doctor scheduling app after reading this article, we can help you figure out the right model for your solution. Having experience in healthcare application development of different levels and complexity, we understand this industry's main problem, risks, and purposes and are ready to share our technical expertise with you.

Contact us to start your own appointment app development!