Hospital Mobile App Development: A Comprehensive Guide

24 November 2021 • 15 min read

Co-Founder at Softermii

In the era of digital transformation, developing a hospital app for patients determines hospital efficiency. With the instant benefits of increasing patient happiness, optimizing wait time, and improving disease monitoring, this technological enhancement lets your healthcare institution maintain its current level of satisfaction with the medical services. It can even boost it further. As Deloitte observers state, current digital health apps drive a preventative, digital-first Future of Health as the global trend.

In this review, we’ve collected all the key information on the hospital app development. The guide contains an overview of recent post-COVID-19 updates, main advantages, essential features, approximate costs, and useful tips to get high-quality software development services for hospital apps.

By the way, if you need experienced hospital app developers, you can contact us for advice.

Keep on reading!

The guide contains an overview of recent post-COVID-19 updates, main advantages, essential features, approximate costs, and useful tips to get high-quality software development services for hospital apps.

Impact of COVID-19 on Hospital Apps

The global pandemic had fueled the hospital apps market. Since its beginning, people constantly worry about their health, and the situation doesn’t change with time. Causing the need for remote working models and distant care, COVID-19, among all, has accelerated the development of hospital technologies.

In this regard, current medical solutions should be cloud-based and contain IoT, AI, blockchain, Big Data, and analytics technologies. In terms of healthcare APIs, the apps of this type can include box API, human API, BetterDoctor, Doximity, and Apple HealthKit API.

With all these parameters, the hospital app turns into a comprehensive and full-cycle solution that covers all the key processes in the medical organization. The exact application areas here include database management, remote monitoring, experience personalization, population health management, and the inclusion of wearable devices.

Leveraging Data for Healthcare

The presence of a centralized database makes it easy for health practitioners to fill and maintain medical records about patients. Electronic data reduces the amount of paperwork in the hospital and increases its overall performance and effectiveness. In return, patients can receive more accurate diagnoses based on the information carefully filled and stored in the software. This is one of the reasons why hospital app development is relevant in 2022.

Remote Patient Monitoring

With the growing popularity of Telehealth solutions, healthcare practitioners managed to reach patients even from their homes, schools, and workplaces. People can maintain their common lifestyle and still get instant medical help remotely.

For doctors, the growing demand for virtual hospital software development means providing healthcare services from the comfort of their office, without the need to spend time and money to get to the patients’ places.

Patient-Customer Experience Personalization

Customer loyalty is a must for any organization. In the case of hospitals, an app serves as the platform for patients and doctors to maintain communication and strengthen their relationships. With the hospital technologies, health practitioners get the ability to complete the required procedures. In some cases, doctors can even make diagnoses remotely.

With the extensive database and in-app analytics, health practitioners get an opportunity to deliver a service of higher quality to patients. Furthermore, the software solution is an effective promotion tool as you develop a mobile app for a hospital that accurately addresses the needs and preferences of your patients. In the long run, a hospital app becomes a profitable investment and reduces the daily costs of hospital maintenance.

Population Health Management

With remote technologies, medical professionals can reach a greater number of patients faster. Both doctors and their clients don’t need to travel from their computers, which saves costs, handles the problems connected with canceled costs, and makes regular checkups more convenient and fast. Even people living in distant areas can get access to hospital services from now on.

Wearable Devices in Healthcare

IoT solutions also increase the effectiveness of healthcare, providing the tools for diagnosing and tracking habits. This innovation strengthens the positions of remote patient care, providing doctors with the relevant data they can timely act upon. The capabilities of wearables include detecting heart strokes, monitoring mental conditions, preventing arrhythmia, assisting therapy, and even reducing the death risks.

How a Clinic Mobile Application Can Improve Hospital Efficiency?

Among all, developing an app for hospitals brings more loyal clients to all the healthcare practitioners — be that a medical center, private clinic, state hospital, laboratory, pharmacy, research institute, or training psychologists. Being able to handle interactions more easily, patients are more engaged in communication with their health providers, significantly enhancing hospital efficiency.

Furthermore, if you build a mobile app for your clinic, you get a great tool for collecting patient data, behavior, and feedback reports. Stored in electronic medical records, this information serves as the basis of your communication with patients.

Last but not least, hospital apps assist in compliance management. Once requested from a reliable vendor, hospital apps comply with all the norms and governmental regulations and update this information promptly. This way, the digital solution reduces the common tension and safety cautions for hospitals. That is why it is so important to think about clinic app development.

Hospital App Features

Feature selection is another important step of hospital app development. Once you decide to invest in custom hospital apps, check if your platform you get contains the core functionality of hospital apps. Depending on your specific needs, the list of these features can be longer and even include the technologies from other spheres. However, maintaining the basic set of modules is critical for increasing your hospital effectiveness for real.

Patient Medical Records (EMS)

Electronic patient data is the basis of healthcare app functionality. The main problems are safety and restrictions, so your developers should be ready to address them properly. Once implemented, this feature enables the fast and efficient exchange of information between doctors and patients.

Diagnoses

For this feature, your software should include academic knowledge along with the categorized list of diagnoses. Otherwise, the process will become too complicated and inaccurate.

Treatment Protocols

As the basis for effective planning, treatment protocols can guide doctors through the examination process.

Notifications

Your health institution can use notifications for various purposes, including making appointments, changing the schedule, and making personalized reminders for patients to take their pills or send the relevant health parameters.

Payments

Another important feature of hospital application development. A secure payment gateway is a critical feature for mobile apps in any industry, and hospital apps are not an exception to this rule. This feature lets you process payments faster and easier.

Online Support

Online support is the basic module for the clinic mobile app, especially if you don’t invest in videoconferencing features. Your users should always be able to reach a doctor or a healthcare provider in case of emergency to receive instant care and get answers to critical health-related questions.

Scheduling Appointments

Doctor appointment app development lets patients demand a doctor for their health problems. With this feature, people can use their smartphones to plan checkups, request medication pickups, and access e-prescriptions. It is a time-saving factor for patients and doctors, especially if combined with receiving reminders via notifications.

Doctor Profiles

Let your patients pick the doctor by their profiles in the system that contain photos, detailed descriptions, working hours, and feedback from previous patients. Although seemingly tiny, this feature increases the trustworthiness and transparency of your hospital.

Additional Features

Dashboards. If you need the maximum data imaging, this module will provide several easy-to-use interfaces to make it possible.
Integration with wearables. This feature links your existing or new wearables with the software so that your workers can instantly get the relevant updates without notifying patients.
Location-based services. With the way-finder technology, you can show patients routes to the hospital and help them navigate inside the building.
Video calls. This module is critical if you want to monitor patients remotely. With a safe video conferencing platform, your doctors get extra opportunities to establish reliable communication with clients and make accurate diagnoses.
Health reporting sharing. With this feature, you can exchange critical information within the hospital automatically.

Cost of Hospital Mobile App Development: Tips to Pay a Reasonable Price and Not Save on Quality

The exact price tag for clinic app development services heavily depends on the complexity of the solution. The factors affecting the final cost include the size of your clinic and the number of features involved. Suppose you prefer saving some money and checking on the effectiveness of the solution first. In that case, we recommend investing in an MVP. It is an app version that contains minimal functionality of the future solution that will cost you from $40 000.

Another important factor is the rate of the clinic app developers who work for you. In our recent guide on the cost of hiring developers worldwide, we’ve mentioned the average prices in the US, EU, and Latin America and strongly recommend Ukraine as the location with the true value-for-money. After picking the country, pay attention to the company size (developers from startups and agencies usually cost cheaper) and the seniority level of a developer hired (don’t save on the software development expertise).

This way, you’ll optimize the price of hospital mobile app development and get a truly reliable service. After determining the level of app sophistication and the exact developers who hire for building a hospital app for doctors and/or patients, you can discuss the exact cost of hospital app development directly with your tech partner.

Read Also: mHealth App Development Guide

Compliances to Consider in Hospital Mobile App Development

Security is critical for medical apps and patient data storing. Since hospitals deal with sensitive information, governments have developed several requirements your digital platform should comply with to maintain the required safety level.

Here is the list of compliances for different countries. Be aware of and be ready to discuss with your tech partner:

ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act)

This US regulation requires electronic and information solutions to be accessible for people with disabilities, i.e., include audio descriptions, options to change the text size and contrast ratio, offer clear navigation, etc.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Pay attention to confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all electronic health information; protect against anticipated data security threats.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

The EU legislation sets specific requirements for collecting, processing, and storing personal data. For the health apps, it goes about health and biometrics data and genetics information.

DPA (Data Protection Act) for the United Kingdom

Like GDPR, the DPA demands that personal data be used fairly, lawfully, and transparently; for explicitly defined purposes, relevant and limited to only what is necessary. It also requires keeping it up to date and deleting it if it is no longer needed.

PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) for Canada

Check how the solution will comply with the rules of handling personal data. PIPEDA covers the name, age, financial data, ID number, ethnicity, nationality, race, DNA and blood type info, marital status, employment, education, and medical records, among others as personal information.

APPI (Act on the Protection of Personal Information) for Japan

This document includes strict regulations concerning the cross-border transfer of private data. Also, it requires obtaining the explicit consent of a data subject to give third party access to personal information. Data controllers can only share personal information with third parties if the sharing benefits the data subjects.

PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act) for Singapore

Like other regulations, PDPA obliges businesses and organizations to treat personal data responsibly and accountably. It also sets clear guidelines for sharing, accessing, and correcting personal information.

Read Also: Healthcare app marketing ideas

Softermii Medical Apps Experience

Softermii is a hospital mobile app development company with expertise in such relevant fields as HIPAA compliance and telemedicine. In this set of solutions, our particular focus is on health for diabetes, assisting people with tracking their problems and key patterns. With Softermii’s services, your app will get a wide set of features, including diabetes programs, health records, and guides for self-education of patients.

Alternatively, our hospital app developers can build a program for appointments and consultation booking. The Medrealtime platform we developed can handle heavy doctors’ workloads and time and accurately overcome clients’ needs. It works as a native app, compatible with Android and iOS devices alike.

Generally, the basic steps of clinic mobile app development with our dedicated team involve:

Project concept discussion. At this stage, we determine your business goals and analyze the market to create an action plan for app development, supplemented by the relevant mockups and prototypes.
Designing. We create all the interfaces, app structure, and navigation to see how your future app looks instantly.
Coding and Quality Assurance. We put the design on paper into action, programming the app logic, establishing server connections, and conducting several rounds of QA tests. This way, we can guarantee to deliver you an error-free and working app.
Launch and maintenance. We support the app publication on App Store, Google Play, and/or prepare its desktop version, depending on your initial request. After the launch, we keep in touch to quickly fix the post-launch problems and enlarge app functionality, if needed.

Ask Our Help to Create Your Own Clinic App!

As you can see, developing clinic apps requires specific knowledge and integrating several critical features and compliances at once. The diversity of healthcare app development services makes it hard to predict the exact cost of the solution, especially if you don’t have a reliable tech partner in mind. Softermii can help!

Our clinic app developers have vast expertise in developing medical and hospital apps, and we’ll be glad to input our skills and knowledge into your digital solution! Once you request a custom app development from Softermii, you can enlarge your hospital solution with the list of our healthcare services that include:

Healthcare application development
HIPAA video
Pharmaceutical apps
PETREALTIME
Telehealth applications
WebRTC
mHealth apps
IoT firmware
Medical enterprise applications
Health insurance management
Healthcare data security
Compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and HITECH
Blockchain and EHR

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to develop an app for hospitals?

Depending on the complexity of the clinic application, the set of features, and the choice of a model for interacting with hospital app developers, the time to build a mobile app for your clinic for clinic can be from 4 to 6 months from the basic version (MVP).

Is it possible to develop a hospital app for less than $50,000?

It is possible to reduce the cost of developing an application for a hospital, but it will be problematic to make a truly high-quality application and invest less than $ 50,000. As a rule, the quality of a hospital application directly depends on the investment made in its development.

What are tech trends applied in hospital applications?

When developing a clinic application, it is advisable to use technologies such as AI, IoT, and telemedicine technologies, as well as healthcare privacy and security.

How do you develop a healthcare app?

Our company tries to follow 5 steps on the way to creating a hospital application, namely: audience research, pre-development, development, testing, and release of the product.

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Written by:

Andrii Horiachko