How many times have you heard it said that the internet has transformed modern life? Indeed new technologies have had a profound impact on the healthcare system. Nowadays customers can book an appointment, request a prescription and look at test results online.
The world population is growing and becoming more prone to chronic conditions like asthma, cardiovascular disease, heart failure, COPD and diabetes. So the demand for health care systems has increased and yet there is a shortage of doctors to provide health care services to everyone.
Telehealth technology is especially poised to have a significant impact on the way patients virtual video visits with doctors and receive care.
What is telehealth used for?
Technology that is used to share, store, and analyze health information can be known as healthIT or “health information technology”. Telehealth, or telemedicine, is a group of technologies within healthIT, is used to deliver health information, clinical care, health education, and health-related services remotely.
Majorly there are three main categories of telemedicine technology,
- Remote Patient Monitoring is a means of monitoring clinical information and patient health remotely. It is mostly used in the management and treatment of chronic conditions.
- Store and Forward is the oldest technique of telemedicine technology, which refers to the capture, storage, and transmittal of the information or images to one provider to another.
- Real-time audio/video communication in the form of communicating to doctors or specialists from a different location or the same location using video-audio enabled devices or computer audio.
The global telehealth market is likely to cross $112 billion marks by 2025, according to a report published by Grand View Research. The digital healthcare market is rapidly growing due to mobile healthcare application contributions in recent years. Some popular telemedicine or doctor on-demand apps are ZocDoc, Doctor on Demand, and Health Tap.
What is Doctor on Demand mobile apps?
Doctor on-demand mobile apps can be a combination of two individual apps as patients’ apps and doctors’ apps. Both apps have unique features that help patients and doctors to enable smooth video consultation anytime. It can be downloaded individually by doctors and patients. These apps run on a smartphone, tablets, and computers and offer 24/7 consultation with specialists.
Why telemedicine apps are so popular?
Telemedicine apps are becoming famous because the process of consultation online with specialists is simple and saves lots of time and money for both doctors and patients. Patients need to list symptoms, tell medical history, start video consultation, show the symptoms using the camera on phone or tablet, Get a prescription on the device and Get well soon. The touch of technology and the waiting time from 72 hours reduced to nearly 3 minutes.
Just give you a clear picture, let’s discuss the essential features of a doctor on-demand application.
Features for patients App
- SignIn / Sign up
- Profiles
- Search Doctors
- View Doctors Profile
- Book an appointment
- Track Doctor’s Location
- Video conferencing
- In-app chat and voice-only calls
- Cloud-based electronic medical storage
- Medication tracker
- Geolocation
- Payment Gateway Integration
- Make Favourites
- Ratings and Reviews
Here patients can sign in using social media accounts or registered accounts. The signup process demands only emails or social handles.
The patient’s profile feature is essential for doctors to know the name, address, sex, age, medical history, and other important data necessary for the treatment process.
Here users can search for doctors’ profiles as per their needs. For example, if one is experiencing fever, he would talk to a General Physician by simply searching for General Physician instead of looking in the whole database of doctors for finding the one.
After searching the doctor’s list, the user can view the doctor’s profiles in detail including name, specialization, and location of the clinic.
This module is important for a patient to book an appointment by checking the available time slot via the interactive calendar and set an appointment as per their preferred time.
This feature will be the benefit of the patient to track the doctor’s location on their devices and search specialists based on their proximity.
Live patient-doctor engagement is an essential feature of doctor on demand apps. A patient can personally interact with a doctor, show their symptoms, and get prescriptions accordingly. Patients can consult doctors from anywhere and anytime. Which makes this app unique and useful.
Some patients do not want to share their faces and want to remain incognito. For this purpose, doctor on demand apps offer in-app chat or voice-only calls feature to interact with doctors. This features extremely useful when a patient wants to get or share timely updated reports, address injuries, and after medicine symptoms to a specialist.
Past e-medical histories that contain all the information including patients profile, medical data, communication history can be obtained. This medical information is saved safely in cloud-based electronic medical storage which patients can get any time and share it with other specialists or loved ones.
As per the doctor’s prescription, the patient can get a real-time reminder to take medicine on time. This feature is extremely useful when the user forgot to take medicine due to a busy work schedule.
Telemedicine apps using google maps to track the patient’s locations, utilize the routes and nearby pharmacies when users search for medical stores.
Secure payment gateway integration which accepts all major credit cards: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. It will help the users in making payments online without any hassles.
Many specialists registered with these apps, users can mark favorite specialists to make it easy to find-out and access at a glance.
Most of the registered doctors can be consulted based on their ratings and reviews given by patients. It is very important for others to choose the right specialist for a consultation.
Features for doctors App
- Profiles
- Schedule & Manage Appointments
- White Boards
- Live Video Calls
- EMR Integration
- Digital Prescriptions
As a matter of first importance, Doctor's profile is crutial for patients to see the doctor's name, profile photo, user ratings, career achievements, areas of expertise, clinic location, as well as available appointment hours.
This feature is important for doctors to see booked, cancelled, and completed appointments. Also, doctors can schedule appointments for their patients as per their availability.
As an optional feature, It helps doctors to explain anything to their patients or colleagues.
Patients' health can be monitored using live video call. Doctors can ask patients to show their symptoms and treat the patients accordingly.
Patient's medical histories and records can be integrated with electronic medical records(EMR) features by doctors anytime.
All the medical prescription can be prescribed by doctors on the app. Patients can use the prescription to buy medicine and save it to their devices for future use.
Features for Admin Panel
- Dashboard
- Patient Management
- Doctors Management
- Report Management
- Notification Module
Admin has the access to view patient activity, doctors activity and control every aspect of what is experienced by patients and doctors through the admin panel dashboard.
This module is important to monitor all the patients information including personal data, medical history. Hence timely and better treatment can be offered to patients.
Doctors details including personal data, expertise, availability can be managed by the admin. Admin can also categorize doctors list as per their field of speciality.
Admin can manage detailed reports related to every patient and manage booked appointments, cancelled appointments, and ongoing appointments. Hence, all information is generated timely as and when needed.
This is a vital module for admin as it allows admin to send important notification to patients and doctors when needed.
Challenges of developing a telemedicine app
Just like other medical service providing apps, building telemedicine apps have certain challenges which need to be addressed,
- User Experience
- Security concerns
- Lack of Trust
- Compliance with healthcare legislation
Working out a great UI/UX implementation for patients, doctors and admin apps is important. Designers need to consider style uniformity, and all elements should operate as one for three different apps.
All information stored in the database is private and sensitive. All customers want their data to be safe and know who else has access to it. So it will be a challenge to build multiple-factor authentication and data encryption functionalities for the system.
As most people prefer to visit their family doctors personally, as they may be a lack of trust related to the qualifications of doctors available on the app. There must be a transparent rating system that needs to be implemented.
Telemedicine apps must comply with the acts and laws for medical data processing, data protection and payment procedures of the different countries.
How does the Telemedicine app make money?
The telemedicine app offers a range of business opportunities. The majority of telemedicine apps do not earn from subscription-based services. So how does it make money?
Firstly, the app charges the 25 percent fee to patients when they pay for a consultation. Which is completely depends on the specialist and the consultation duration.
Secondly, App offers software as services to medical establishments and big enterprises. For instance, companies pay for per employee every month. Which is approximately 1$ per employee each month.
Furthermore, Other options are also available to monetize your doctor on-demand app are like annual membership for a patient, the monthly fee for doctors and patients, franchising, or a per minute video conferencing and on-call charge.
How much does doctor on-demand app development cost?
You would need to pay for following services to develop an app like Doctor on Demand for iOS and Android,
- Business analysis - 100h
- Project management - 260h
- UI design - 680h
- UX design - 450h
- Backend development - 930h
- Frontend development - 2380h
- Quality assurance - 640h
To find out the cost of the development, We need to multiply by the hourly rate of the health app development company. Hourly rate for application development is dependent on different regions and charging which vary greatly from $16 per hour to $150 per hour.
Start Your Own Doctor on-demand App
Time is just right to start with the development of a doctor on-demand app, you should consider following options prior to telemedicine app development; provide collaboration to healthcare providers, users; provide highly encrypted video features; provide medical data security and analytics features; provide healthcare consultation remotely.
You definitely need a trustable development partner to provide proper quality for a doctor on-demand app development. Hire a dedicated team with expertise in healthcare app development.
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