The outbreak of COVID-19 has increased the pressure on the medical industry. The rise in demand and shortage of robust ecosystems has caused trouble for multiple medical businesses globally.
Over 90% of medical providers are thinking of investing in remote patient monitoring technologies. The telemedicine business surged up to 4000% in 2020.
The popularity of telemedicine apps is rising, and if you are planning to launch your telemedicine app, there are different factors you need to understand and learn by tapping the green button.
A telemedicine app enables patients to book a medical treatment for combating their disorder or disease within a few clicks. It’s important to understand the vital features, use cases, and elements your telemedicine app should include.
With years of experience in developing telemedicine apps for different medical institutions and other startups, we’ll share our expertise and experience to help you bypass the hurdles.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
Features Your Telemedicine App Should Include
Their telemedicine app must have two variants—one for the medical staff or the doctors and the other for the patients.
Both the applications have different basic features that need to be included in the modern-day telemedicine application. Let’s explore the features of both the applications
Patient’s App
The patient application is used for the patients you need to book appointments, get a doctor’s consultation, or get additional symptoms. It needs to be simple and easy to use for increased usability and exposure amongst the patients.
- Appointment bookings
The first basic feature that the application needs to have is the appointment booking feature with therapists, doctors, or practitioners.
It should provide the patients with a wide range of options for physicians, nurses, doctors, and other medical staff based on their medical conditions for bookings.
The more convenient the booking process, the better the application’s popularity amongst the patients. Your applications should be quick and smooth enough to connect the patients with the best medical brains for better health treatment.
- Modern-day communication channels
Your telemedicine app needs to be reliable and convenient for the patients to efficiently connect and communicate with the medical staff. Seamless medical treatment should include different communication channels like video, text, or audio.
The popularity of live session features with video connect is rising, and patients demand these features from the service providers for better communication with the doctors. The modern-day communication channels break the location barriers for patients and help them get the best treatment for their disorders or diseases from top doctors worldwide.
Apart from live video, you need to include chat features for quick consultation in common diseases like cold, cough, or body pain. You can also provide patients with options like recording a video, photo clicking, or other quick features to connect with the doctors or practitioners to get quick medical guidance and support.
- Customer support
The wider the horizon of your user base, the more issues and errors you can encounter that need to be resolved within quick succession for a quality customer experience.
You need to integrate robust customer support to help patients bypass different difficulties, technical glitches, or other issues. You can provide automated chatbot support to connect your patients with a 24*7 helpline or WhatsApp customer support.
You need to ensure that your support ecosystem is smooth and users don’t face issues connecting with a professional representing your brand.
- Tracking and organizing health information in one place
You need to ensure that the health history of the single user is stored in a single place to make it convenient for the patient or the doctor to analyze their previous record.
It can help treat patients suffering from chronic ailments and make it easier to track their improvements and progress. It might look like a basic feature, but it plays a critical role in the patient’s treatment process.
- Automatic prescriptions delivery to a nearby pharmacy
One of the crucial features that can help your telemedicine app stand out from the rest of the industry is the feature of automation. Once the patient gets the consultation done with the doctor, the prescribed medicine can be sent to the nearby pharmacy, and the medicines can be delivered to the patient’s home in no time.
It can remove the hassle of looking out for the prescribed medication from one store to another and minimize the time and effort for the patients. The automation features can be great for people who cannot step out of their homes because of poor health.
These are the must-have features for your patient’s app. Let’s look at the doctor’s app.
Telemedicine App For Doctors
Different features can be included to enhance the quality and user experience of the application. But we have filtered the basic features that you should include in your doctor’s application.
1. Accept/Reject appointment
Once a patient has requested an appointment with a healthcare provider like a therapist or doctor, they should have the option of rejecting or accepting the request based on their schedule.
It can help them streamline their time and patient consultations and ensure that they don’t overload themselves. It can allow doctors and other medical staff members to handle their operations freely.
2. Video call & chat option
Like the patients’ app, the doctors also need to have a video call and chat option that can help them communicate with their patients. It can help them ensure that the communication is smooth and there’s no lag in their medical service.
From video to text, the communication channel should be integrated into the doctor’s application that can help to ensure quality treatment of the patients.
The servers and communication networks should be of great quality to remove the lag or differences that can deliver a poor user experience to the medical experts.
3. Appointment calendar
The appointment calendar is one of the best features of a doctor’s telemedicine app. You need to ensure that doctors can check their appointments and track their day-to-day schedules and never miss an appointment.
They should have the freedom to change the schedule of the appointments in case of emergencies, and the notifications can be sent to the patients to ensure complete transparency.
It can help create a strong and professional online medical service ecosystem that can attract the best medical talent and a wider user base to connect and solve their medical issues.
Apart from these top features, you can also include appointment reminders, patient queue management, appointment scheduling, online payment, online billing, HIPAA compliance, and ePrescription features in the telemedicine app for doctors.
You also need admin portal access to get a bird’s eye view of both the applications and the freedom to remove different difficulties users face in your telemedicine app ecosystem.
Now that you understand the features, you need to know the cost of getting a telemedicine app developed by expert developers.
How Much It Costs To Develop A Telemedicine App?
The price for developing a dedicated telemedicine app can vary from developer to developer. If you want to get a basic telemedicine app, you can choose freelance developers who can do the job for you for $5-$10 per hour based on the hours it takes to complete the task.
But there are multiple complications you can face hiring freelance developers because of the lack of experience and professionalism compared to a professional app development agency.
We recommend choosing a professional agency that can deliver quality results at reasonable prices. The average cost for getting a telemedicine app developed by professional developers can range from around $25,000 – $70,000.
If we boil it down, it comes to $25-$150 per hour based on the complexities of your requirements and the app development you associate with.
Let’s look at the basic steps of developing your telemedicine app if you hire an app development agency.
Steps To Create A Telemedicine App
Planning
You need to kickstart your telemedicine app development by planning your vision and mission with the telemedicine application. You need to list your requirements and goals to achieve your desired result from the developers.
Get a quote
Once the plan is ready, you should focus on connecting with multiple app development agencies and request their project development quotes.
It can help you filter out the best that fits your budget and has a history of delivering quality results. You need to take your time filtering the agency you want to associate with because it can decide the quality of work you get.
Project discussion
Once selected the agency that will handle your telemedicine app development, you need to share your requirements and goals with the representative and get a tentative delivery date.
You should also sign a Non-Disclosure agreement to maintain transparency and build trust with the agency. List down the basic features for both the applications and your admin portal and ensure no complications and issues in the communication and understanding of the features.
Development
Keep a check on the development phase to ensure the development is happening in the right direction.
You can contact the project manager to get regular updates on the project to help you collaborate to achieve your desired business outcomes.
App demo
Once the development is completed, you can run the first demo version of the applications and spot the bugs and glitches that can help you improve the user experience.
You can roll the beta version of the application where multiple users can explore different application features to spot the areas of improvement before the final launch. The changes can be made quickly by the developer team that helps you launch the application quickly.
Deployment and support
If you are associated with a leading app development company, you don’t need to worry about the deployment and post-development support.
You can launch your application on multiple marketplaces to make it accessible to the patients and doctors to connect and solve their health concerns.
But out of multiple app development companies available in the industry, you need to choose the best for your telemedicine app development.
Skein Technologies Has Got You Covered
Being one of the leading app development companies globally, we at Skein Technologies have an experienced and vetted team of expert mobile developers in Houston who can create the best telemedicine app.
With years of experience in helping medical institutions and startups grow and scale their digital presence, we understand the importance of developing a user-friendly application that doctors and patients can use.
We can help you create a quality ecosystem for smooth communication between medical experts and patients. Get in touch with our experts to get customized quotes tailored to your unique requirements.
