The rapid rise in the number of health monitoring apps in the past decade is astonishing. From apps that let you book a cab to apps that let you book hotel rooms in foreign nations, these apps let you do it all with just a few taps of your fingers. According to the Statista, there are around 2.6 million apps on Google play store as of December 2018 and somewhere around 2 million apps on the Apple App Store as of the third quarter of 2018. These figures clearly indicate that it is a booming market which is not likely to show any sign of slowing down any time soon.

One of the hottest apps on major app stores has been health monitoring apps this year. Mobile app developers all across the world have realized how incredibly useful these apps are to their users and over the last couple of years they have come up with some great Healthcare apps. One of the most popular among them is Health4me. And today, we will take a look at how you can develop your very own Healthcare app.

So let’s get right to it then!

But before we do,

there are a couple of things which need mentioning. First of them is the fact that there is not just one type of Healthcare apps in the market. Based on the varied needs of the users, Healthcare app developers have created different types of apps which serve different purposes. And before you get on with planning your app and hiring app developers to build your Healthcare app, you need to be sure about the kind of app you want. According to the experts at Matellio, Healthcare app market can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Various Types of Healthcare Apps

1. Physician Mobile Apps
2. Remote Health Monitoring Apps
3. Healthcare Apps for urgent help
4. Doctor oriented Healthcare mobile apps
5. Drug Monitoring Apps
6. Healthcare apps as reminders
7. Health and Wellness Apps

1. Physician Mobile Apps

These apps help both doctors and patients alike. Mostly they work as a bridge between a physician and a patient and allows them to find each other. Apps like these make sure that a patient finds the right doctor for his condition and fast which further leads to a better, or to be more accurate, an optimal treatment.

2. Remote Health Monitoring Apps

Remote health monitoring apps come in very handy to people who are suffering from chronic diseases which require vigilance of a doctor all the time. People suffering from conditions like diabetes and asthma etc. can use these apps to communicate with the clinic whenever they need. Furthermore, these apps allow doctors to keep the most recently updated data about a patient’s condition which leads to better treatment. Apart from this, all the regular features which an app such as this must have- online chat support, medication reminders, etc. are available in these apps, too.

3. Healthcare Apps for Urgent Help

These are the apps which are strictly built to save lives. Urgent help mobile apps can be used to send distress calls to the nearest clinic or hospital in case of an emergency and can be used by the patient himself or someone who is close to him at the time of emergency.

4. Doctor Oriented Healthcare Mobile Apps

These apps are for doctors only and can help them in more than one way. Firstly, it takes care of keeping all the patients’ records in physical form at all times. A doctor can easily upload/update a patient’s symptoms/health metrics to the hospital’s database using these apps. Then it makes accessing those records really easy; since these apps are always available in their mobile phones, they can look the records up any place and at any time. Furthermore, these apps are powerful enough to display various reports, charts and other health metrics along with recent analytics reports which allow doctors to get a broader view of a patient’s current health condition.

5. Drug Monitoring Apps

A doctor cannot do much without the power of drugs. He can pinpoint a condition, he can read symptoms and then he can prescribe you medicines according to them. But everything after that is out of his hands. But it happens all too often that patients forget to take their medications and as a result, they sometimes suffer from slight inconvenience and in some drastic cases, serious kickbacks from a health point of view. So to monitor a user’s drug intake and remind him when to take them and keep them on a strict routine, these apps came to be. Apart from this, these apps can serve as a link between a doctor, a patient, and a pharmacy. A patient can ask for a refill, a doctor can confirm it and the patient can order it from various pharmacies who are registered with this app, all from the comfort of his home.

6. Healthcare Apps as Reminders

These apps apply the concept of drug monitoring apps on a broader scale. These apps are designed to keep tabs of all your health-related schedules- doctor visits, routine checkup, etc.

7. Health and Wellness Apps

These are your common day-to-day Healthcare and wellness apps which include a lot of various subtypes. From fitness app for gym enthusiasts to people trying to shave off a couple of layers of unwanted fat from their bodies or mental wellness apps which focus specifically on improving your lifestyle by meditations and other such efforts, these apps serve a lot of purposes and are some of the most in-demand apps on all major app stores.

Also Read- Wellness Tracker App Development: Latest Trends, Technologies and Features

Key Advantages of Health4me App

Now after going over the various types of Healthcare apps, let us move on to some of the advantages that these apps can have for their users, or to be more precise, what are the advantages of apps like Health4me which make them so desirable to their users.

1. A Comforting Environment  

The first thing that works for Health4me is its incredibly user-friendly UI/UX. Using this app is a delight and utterly hassle-free. Unlike many other apps out there in the market, it doesn’t trigger any type of anxiety or agitation in a user, which is a huge plus point. This is something you have to be able to achieve with your app, too. Because no matter how unique and how out-of-the-box functionality it might have, if it isn’t easy to use, then you’ve lost a huge chunk of users.

2. One Stop Shop

Next thing that Health4me does right is being the ultimate Healthcare and fitness tool for its users. It is basically the only tool they’ll need. Its robust design and just a massive array of features together make all the other apps of the same persuasion futile. It allows users to seek out medical professionals to help them with their various conditions, it acts as a communication bridge between doctors and patients, keeps a track of vital medical metrics for every patient so that they, as well as their doctors, can monitor them. On top of all this, Health4me keeps giving its users reminders about their drugs, doctor visits, etc. So basically it is like an all in one utility tool of Healthcare apps.

3. Marketing

And the third thing that worked for Health4me was naturally its rigorous marketing. A sound publicity plan is something every great app needs. It can help your app reach its users, or to be more exact, users who are in dire need of it. Because let’s face it, Healthcare apps are not FUN apps, they are NEED apps and anyone who downloads them must be going through something big in his life, healthwise. So Health4me’s success owes a lot to its marketing team’s focused strategy which was able to get the word about it to the people who could actually benefit from it.

Must Have Features to Develop an App Like Health4me App

Now after learning about some of the advantages Health4me gives to its users, let us move on to some of the must-have features for the MVP (Minimum viable product) of a Healthcare app according to Health4me and our experts here at Matellio.

1. Chat

This feature lets a user, or a patient, have an online conversation with someone from the clinic or your company regarding any health-related issues. This feature will allow your users to get in touch with a medical professional in times when he is incapable of leaving the house or is far away from his hometown/city and needs some clarification on some matter.

2. A Fast Search Tool

It will allow your users to search for doctors, pharmacies, nearby clinics, etc. anytime anywhere they want. This will further ease a user’s mind if he knows that every information related to his health is safely in his pocket and just a few finger taps away. Make sure that you add a lot of filters to your search mechanism as well which will further optimize a user’s search according to them.

3. Registration

Now in most apps, this particular feature is there but is never essential; that is a user is not forced to register to an app and can make use of it as a guest. But in a Healthcare app, this feature serves a bigger purpose than just getting your hands on a user’s basic information so that you can send them promotional material. When a user registers on apps like Health4me, they are required to add more than just their basic information, they are required to add their medical data, too. This gives them an option to maintain a digital personal health record which they can share with any doctor over the app. This will not only help them in keeping it updated by feeding the latest health metrics (blood pressure, sugar levels, etc.) but also gain useful analytics based on their previous data as well.

4. Making Appointments with Doctors

Now, this is a straightforward feature which needs to be in your app. The reason being, not every patient is in the condition to go to the clinic and make an appointment, and calling in to make an appointment at the hospital just seems silly after you’ve let them search for a doctor with your app. So to add on to that feature, it is required that you let a patient search for a doctor and make an appointment with him, too. This will take all the hassle and errors out of the process and reduce the wastage of papers too since digital tokens and receipts will be generated for every appointment made from the app.

5. Reminders

This features basically operates on its own and its sole purpose to exist is to manage a patient’s calendar. There can be reminders for various purposes, from reminding a user to take his meds to reminding him of his upcoming appointments, a lot of things can fall within the scope of this little feature.

6. Pharmacy and Pathlabs Links

Serving as a connecting tube between doctors and patients is just not enough for a Healthcare app these days. Especially if you’re in the market to challenge heavyweights like Health4me. You need to create a mesh of all the branches inside a clinic or a hospital, bring all of them within a user’s reach. By this, we mean that you need to provide your users the ability to contact pharmacies and path labs. They should be able to order refills or new drugs to be delivered to them, and they can be informed about the availability of a drug which they wanted earlier but was out of stock. In a similar way, this app can be used to make appointments for X-Rays, MRI, etc, too. And furthermore, the people at these path labs can send the results of their tests in digital form which is really favorable when the patient is in no condition to move between the lab and his ward/home over and over again.

7. Analytics

A picture is worth a thousand words, and it is especially true for the Healthcare sector. This feature allows a user to get an overall visual representation of his heath and paints a picture of how bad or good his conditions are. Bar graphs, pie charts, line graphs, and all the other visual forms of data representations can be used to show the data collected by the app over the past few weeks or days and that will, on the overall, tell a user if his health has improved or declined. By gaining this information, a user will be able to talk to his doctor about it and discuss what must be done, or if the conditions are too severe, change the doctor as well.

8. Emergency Calls

This feature exists solely to save lives. By using this feature of the app, a patient can send a distress call out to the nearest clinic or hospital and ask for help. On the other hand, if the user is unable to get to his phone or operate it, someone near him can do that for him.

Also Read- B2B Mobile App Development: A Complete Guide

How to Develop an App Like Health4me?

Now that you’re clear about what your app needs to be, let us get to the point where we tell you how you can turn your idea into reality.

Now in most blogs, you’ll read that the first thing you need to do is hire a mobile app development firm. But alas they are wrong; there are a couple of other steps which need to be conducted before you can get to this phase.

1. Research

You cannot just roll out of your bed tomorrow morning and be like “I will develop a Healthcare and fitness app today”. If that was your plan all along then we’re sorry that we are the ones to stomp on it. It just doesn’t work like that. Once you have decided to develop a Healthcare app, you need to conduct long and thorough research about multiple things which we have mentioned below.

• Trends- You need to make sure that you develop an app which is new and in line with the trend, both in the way it looks and the way it works.
• Enemies- To paraphrase Sun Tzu, it doesn’t matter if you keep an eye on your friends or not, but be sure that you’ve got a firm eye on your enemies. You need to study your future competitors, learn about their business models and their apps. Try to find out what is working for their appx and what isn’t and try to use your findings in your app.
• Customers- In the end, this app is for your customers, and it will do you a lot of good if you took their inputs into considerations as well. Conduct face-to-face interviews and try to find out what they want from an app such as this and try to implement those things in your app. You can also snoop a little on the app store pages of your competitors and learn what users have to say about the services they are offering.

2. Plan

Once you have all the data, it is time to start drawing up the basic blueprint of your app and what you want the final outcome to look like. In this phase, you will land on some major decisions, like the features you want to have in your app, the customers you want to target and what platform you want to go for-Android or iOS or any other. Now keep in mind that over the course of development, a lot of things will change about your app, so you need to be ready to make these changes; keeping an open mind is the best approach before you go ahead and hire application developers for your app.

3. Development

Now again, most blogs will have you believed that this is where you let go of your idea and trust in the firm that you have hired to give you the desired outcome. Well, that’s not true. If you hire a  trustworthy app development firm with a sound work ethic and good communication manners, then you will have complete control over the development process as well. The key is to hire a firm which understands and respects your vision and is able to deliver quality products.

So, conduct a good amount of homework before you go hiring any firm, use sites like Clutch.co to learn about the major players in the game and read their customer feedbacks.

4. Promotion

This phase is just as crucial as the development. Your users need to know about your app, they need to know that you can help them with their needs and they need to be convinced that your app is the last Healthcare app they’ll ever need. This process doesn’t start when you have released your app, but a substantial amount of time before that. Use tools like introduction videos and infographics and post them on various social media platforms and as ads on various search engines to get the word about your app out and create a hype.

Also Read- How is IoT Revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry?

Conclusion

To conclude, creating a Healthcare app is not only a lucrative venture but a noble one as well. You never know when a feature of your app might end up someone’s life. So put all your heart and mind into it and move ahead with great enthusiasm. With the knowledge we have provided you and the right amount of dedication, you might end up creating a Healthcare app like, or even better than, Health4me.

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