38.89 billion US dollars; that’s how big the healthcare app market has already become in the year 2021.
As per the latest study published by Fortune Business Insights, this number is going to multiply almost ten times by the year 2028 to become a market of 314.60 billion USD. A significant factor in this rapid growth is the proportional growth in smartphone usage. Over the last decade, the US has witnessed 84% growth in smartphone adoption rate. And since neither of these statistics is expected to slow down in the near future, it is a wise call to invest in custom mobile apps to grow healthcare services.
Types of Healthcare Apps to Build
Now the range of healthcare apps present in the market is quite wide. It can confound you in understanding which of these can benefit your healthcare business and solve its problems. Here is a list of the most common healthcare apps, you can hire an expert for healthcare technology consulting services and see whether these apps match your requirements.
Chronic Health Monitor App
The app can be used to keep track of a patient’s chronical conditions like blood pressure, blood sugar levels, temperature, weight, cancer symptoms, etc. At its most basic form, the app will simply keep track of all the records that will be manually entered by the users. The app can then have the functionality to visualize the data and alert users when the conditions begin to cross a preset threshold. A more advanced version of the app will be integrated with sensors and other medical devices to capture the data automatically and maintain their track record without bothering the users at all.
On-Demand Doctor App
It will be used to schedule and maintain doctor appointments, online consulting, lab booking, etc., so the users don’t have to wait out any sort of downtime to book a consultation with your healthcare firm. The app can be built for an individual healthcare organization or can be an extensive one with details and booking features for many hospitals that register with the app. Ideally, the app should also have features like live chat, document attachment, user profile management, and appointment history to offer more bespoke values to the users.
Diagnosis Apps
You can invest in such an app to diagnose and uncover very specific illnesses and conditions, or a bunch of them. And since these apps deal with patient data directly, they must always comply with regional medical and data security standards. The apps ask users some conditional questions in a quiz format and then can reveal if the person is indeed healthy or has any condition that requires medical attention. And since the app will rely on AI mostly for its functionalities, it should explicitly be used for preventive purposes only. No such app should be built that promises to replace doctor’s consultations.
Also Read- How to Develop a Medical Diagnosis App?
Health & Lifestyle App
Such apps have become hugely popular among users keen on their health and fitness. These instructive videos for exercises, dietary plans, a community platform, and dedicated fitness trainers give users complete care and support to maintain their health. Now not all the apps that come under this category are as extensive to cover all these features. Some are only limited to showing a playlist of exercises videos or recipes and dietary plans. This minimalist version of the health and lifestyle app has the advantage of being quite a niche and attracting more primed-up users for conversions.
Medical Record App (EMR)
The mobile version of EMR software carries the convenience of accessing and managing records on the go. It allows users to eliminate paperwork, facilitate diagnostics, record and access patients’ info and medical records, and communicate in a HIPAA-compliant environment. While there are many off-the-shelf EMR mobile apps available on the top app markets, like the desktop counterparts they tend to be rigid and filled with features that may not be useful for your healthcare organization. This is why when investing in a mobile CRM app, it is suggested to go with the custom development instead.
Mental Health Apps
The covid-19 pandemic has led to a huge growth in the cases of mental stress, anxiety, and depression. There has never been a time more crucial than now to understand and allay the complications caused by mental health issues. As such an app with features like live chat, therapists’ appointment booking, online sessions, affirmations, progress trackers, and a community of support groups. Now, these apps can be of the informative type or a one for on-demand aid. But regardless of the type, every mental health app should have an SOS button and an interface that is easy to navigate.
Health Education App
These are among the most basic healthcare apps whose only purpose is to provide useful information to the users. Such apps would simply only have a clean interface with a menu bar linking to different screens of apps, each of which will have detailed information on distinct health-related topics. Health education apps can be built for different kinds of diseases and conditions or very specific ones with treatments and other recovery-related content. To make apps like these more engaging, you can add features like quizzes, profile trackers, and contact details of the nearest specialist of the concerned health issue.
Nutrition Management App
With more people becoming cognizant about their health and fitness and the role of different nutrition in them, an app that guides them to a perfectly nutritional diet regime can become an instant hit. The app can use advanced technologies like AR and object recognition to identify your meals and then calculate their nutritional values for you. Additionally, it can create a custom diet plan for you as per your BMI and fitness goals. In the latter case, the app can also share with you some recipes to create a balanced diet and may even have an option of in-app purchases to buy ingredients right then and there. The app can also be used to create a personalized diet plan based on your preferences and lifestyle to further simplify things for you.
On-Demand Medical Aid App
Counted among the most crucial healthcare apps, these are also the most complex to develop. These apps, using cloud computing and storage, collect data of all the physicians and healthcare specialists and then list them for the users based on their requirements of the time. The major purpose of these apps is to get you medical assistance the minute you need them. The app can also be used to book appointments with doctors in near future. Since users can begin to rely on such apps to get quick medical assistance, it’s important to have these apps developed by a trusted mobile app development company that helps you with the QA process and follows all the regional guidelines of data security. You can make apps like these more popular by involving features like patient medical history organization, reviews and ratings, navigation help, and user profile management.
Sleep Management App
These apps help users fight common sleep disorders like insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, RLS, and parasomnia. These can help users create an ideal sleep schedule for them and wearables can even track the kind and states of sleep they have had. The app can then use such daily data to create a progress chart and then based on their periodic results offer improvement measures. Another helpful feature for the app can be a media player with white noise and a playlist filled with relaxing music and sounds.
Women’s Health App
Health apps for women are also among the most popular healthcare apps in the market. They help women manage and track their menstrual and ovulation cycles, offer them advice regarding women-specific health concerns, and offer pre and post-natal guidance for an easier pregnancy and post-partum period. The app can also be used to help women keep a track of their dietary and fitness regime, helping them improve with regular reminders and practice.
Palliative Care App
Apps of this category can prove crucial in the recovery and general health maintenance of patients living with serious and fatal illnesses. The app will have reminders for both medication, and hospital treatments to manage a proper regime. It can also help track patients’ vitals by integrating with a smart healthcare wearable device. Since the app is bout palliative care, it will have ample provision to maintain records of patients’ conditions and medications for a flawless medical history. The app should also have an SOS facility that can alarm both the physician and caretakers whenever a patient is deemed to require medical attention.
How They Can Boost Your Healthcare Services?
All these apps, while varying in their functionalities offer similar benefits to a healthcare organization; here are some of them.
High Productivity
With many of the healthcare services’ functionalities available at one-touch away and a system completely integrated, your team will have easier time improving their productivity.
Increased Efficiency
The features like online appointments, remote access to all medical records, and optimization of consultation time, help the healthcare and medical mobile apps offer an unprecedented efficiency.
Permanent Access
With all the data available on their mobile devices, your team will never lose access to the data they need to perform their duties.
Remote Healthcare
The availability of rich features and seamless access to data, will allow your patients to enjoy healthcare remotely, easily avoiding needless travel to and from the healthcare institution.
Read More: Role of Mobile Apps in Healthcare and Medical Industry
Cost Reduction
As more and more services become available online through mobile apps, your team will improve its productivity leading to a reduction in costs in all its services.
Increased Patient Engagement
The dedicated app with profiles and personalized data, and ceaseless communication often leads to improved patient engagement which eventually helps in improving the effects of treatments.
Reduced Cases of Misdiagnoses
The app offers a better alternative to organizing and accessing all the medical records of a patient. This helps in maintaining optimal diagnostic accuracy and helps avoid errors on account of incomplete information.
Specialized and niche healthcare apps can enhance the operations of hospitals and other medical institutes. While all the apps are capable of offering the abovementioned advantages, there are certain pitfalls associated with pre-built apps which any vigilant healthcare organization should evade.
Why Invest in Custom Healthcare Apps Over the Pre-Built Ones?
While you can invest in pre-built health and fitness apps, there are some serious complications that you are round to run into if you choose to run that ground.
Disadvantages of Off-the-Shelf Healthcare Apps
Here are some major disadvantages that come along with off-the-shelf healthcare apps.
Commercialization
The very reason such apps exist on app markets is that there is a team behind that is looking to make money out of it. As such the competition, motive, and lack of long-term goal often result in a substandard app. Such apps tend to run into some or other error in time, which can have severe consequences considering the critical nature of the data and information medical apps are required to process and generate.
Lack of Customization
Since such apps are built with generic considerations of healthcare organizations, they tend have features that are not necessary for all of them. In contrast, it may also not have many features and functionalities that are required by your organization.
Incompatible
Most of these pre-built and generic healthcare apps are built for a larger use case. This means they usually don’t have the provision to integrate with existing legacy IT systems of the organization. This makes their implementation needlessly difficult. Furthermore, even if your team manages to create channels to synchronize the systems, the flow of data can never become as seamless as required by the fast-paced healthcare industry.
Vendor Lock-Ins
No matter how cost effective and feature rich such apps may be, they always run the risk of vendor lock-ins. The app provider may choose to some of their services more expensive and cancel your subscription without much warning. Alternatively, your app provider may have to cease its functionalities due to external factors. Both the cases can lead to chaotic situations which healthcare organizations should prevent at all costs.
As is apparent, not one of these cons can be resolved by themselves. This is why it is highly recommended that when you decide to go mobile with your healthcare IT solutions, you should go for custom apps.
Benefits of Healthcare App Customization
Here’s how custom healthcare mobile apps create a middle ground for organizations to gain the optimal advantages of converging their services to mobile.
Specific Goals and Needs
Custom mobile apps can be built for specific reasons, making their features more intuitive. Such niche apps also allow your users to complete important operations without needing too much of the mobile device resources.
Personalized UX/UI Design
With custom healthcare mobile app development, you get the advantage to decide the UI and UX elements as per your team’s know-how and preferences. This will help you improve the efficiency of the transition training.
Enhanced Security
With your custom app you will have complete control over on how data will move through it. This will help you ensure that it complies with Open Web Application Security Project and other regional data security standards.
Integrated System
The most significant advantage of a custom app is that you can build it in any which way that simplifies integration with other IT systems of your healthcare organization, this will eventually lead to the easier implementation of automation.
Data Privacy and Security Standards for Healthcare Services Mobile Apps
Most healthcare apps and almost all medical apps record, store, and use a lot of confidential medical and personal information of patients. As such, it is important for them to comply with the data security standards set by the authorities of the region where the app functions. This is why when you hire a mobile app development company to create a custom healthcare app for your organization, it is recommended to ensure whether they can create an environment for the app and its data that complies with the security standards where you want to operate. Here are some of the more popular standards you should take care of if you’re looking to go global with your app.
USA
If your app is built for users residing in the United States of America, it needs to comply with HIPAA regulations to store protected healthcare information. To legally store and process the personal information of users and patients, it also needs to adhere to CCPA and GDPR policies. For the electronic processing of healthcare records, the app will also need to follow NIST guidelines.
Read More: How is Blockchain Changing The Healthcare Sector?
UK
In the United Kingdom, there aren’t any such acts or laws that imply the medical information of a patient and its protection. Rather there is an umbrella Data Protection Act of 1988 that applies to all the data that belongs to a United Kingdom denizen. To learn more about the guidelines of the act and how they would be applicable to the information stored and processed by the app, you can lead the app developers to the NCSC website.
European Union
One of the strictest and most heavily penalizing data protection laws GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is applicable all over the European Union. The law strictly keeps organizations from using the users’ data in any way other than the specific reason they have mentioned while collecting it.
How Matellio can Help You in Custom Healthcare Services App Development?
As a well-trusted mobile app development company with ample experience in the healthcare industry, Matellio can prove to be your ideal IT partner. Our team has worked on applications, web solutions, and software that comply with regional data privacy and security standards. We understand the crucial nature of the information a healthcare app operates on, and hence deploy the best storage and data access practices for both cloud and on-premise environments. We have all the necessary expertise to develop any and all of the aforementioned healthcare mobile apps, tailored to your specific needs. To know more book a free consultation session with our experts today by simply filling in this form.
