No more queues and scheduling appointment by phone. With the rapid growth of medical mobile market, many hospitals provide their service online these days. By establishing a seamless connection between patients and doctors, healthcare apps have brought medical industry to another level. Entrepreneurs all over the world invest into hospital mobile app development as well as doctor apps for private practices.

Due to this fact, there are a lot of types of healthcare apps on the market, from general hospital apps to diagnosis assistants. However, lately it is virtual consultations that are getting more and more recognition. Thanks to them, patients can receive a remote medical support with one tap on their phone.

Many people use doctor appointment apps because of their undoubted convenience. It has never been easier to schedule a visit to a doctor, check your medical record and get professional consultation via video call or chat at any time. Besides such service guarantees complete anonymity to patients. In turn, doctors provide treatment round the clock and get to grow their clients’ base. Moreover the significance of doctor consult apps rises even higher when patient’s life depends on it. With the help of such an app, a doctor can continuously check on the patient’s condition and take prompt actions in case of emergency.

Although healthcare mobile app development is a rather risky venture, because of the high competition, start-up companies still have a chance to enter the market by providing their own on-demand solution.

If you are planning to launch a doctor booking app, and make it to the top, make sure to add the following features to your product:

• Online consulting: a patient can get in touch with a doctor 24/7 via an app
• Appointment booking: a patient can see doctor’s schedule with available dates for appointment.
• Medicine online purchase: users can buy prescribed pills from online pharmacy and order home delivery.
• EMR storage: all medical records of a patient are kept on the app server.
• In-app reminders: a patient and a doctor will get push notifications about upcoming appointment.
• E-prescriptions: after the online appointment is over, a patient receives a list of prescribed medicine via a push-notification.
• In-app automated billing: patient gets an invoice for the online consulting and pays within the app.
• Health tracking: a doctor can track patient’s symptoms, monitor sugar level and blood pressure, etc.
• In-built map: this feature shows routes to nearby emergency rooms and hospitals.

It is important to work out your business model at the early stages of app development. If you are planning to make money with your mobile service, think about possible ways to monetize it. The most popular monetization strategies for telemedicine apps are monthly / annual subscriptions and charging commission fee for each consultation. Also you can consider adding premium services to your healthcare app.

If you already have an app and you want the world to know about it and use it, acquiring an effective marketing strategy is a must. You can either advertise your app on the social media and forums, or present your product to the prospective users – doctors – and let them test your app for themselves, so that they could recommend it to their colleagues in the future. It is also a good idea to offer your potential customers additional benefits that come along with using your app.

To make your app popular among patients, first you need to gain their trust. Make sure that profiles of listed doctors contain detailed information about their education, field of work, years of experience, reviews of previously treated patients.

Last but not least, do not forget that your app has to be compliant with personal data protection regulations, such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in EU. Otherwise you may face severe fines for violating their requirements.

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