Some Reasons to Engage in Hospital App Development

Interested in undertaking a hospital app development project?

It’s an excellent market with many opportunities to be explored.

According to a study done by Marketwatch, “Mobile Health App Market is Expected to Reach USD 94.14 Billion by 2023 Growing at a CAGR of 29.03%”.

Let’s see how you can make your mark in the lucrative industry through successful hospital app development.

Reasons for Hospital App Development

Following are some reasons why you should consider developing a mobile application for hospitals or healthcare providers.

Directory Services Help Patients Find You

The first reason why you need to develop a  mobile app for your hospital is that it can really, really help people find healthcare professionals, follow through with appointments and get the treatment they need when they need it. If you create a mobile hospital directory it will help so many people with the following:

• Finding specialists in their city
• Coordinating appointments
• Knowing where the department is located
• reading valuable content from your hospital, which makes people trust you more

Let’s face it – finding a good doctor or specialist in a large city is really not a simple task. Not to mention, that once you find the specialists, it’s nearly impossible to find their office on a huge medical campus.

Healthcare mobile app development that focuses on directory services can completely eliminate this issue. Your mobile healthcare app can help patients locate a department, physician or building, so they’re never late for an appointment again.

This also saves you time because your staff isn‘t standing around waiting for patients who are late because they’re lost. It also motivates people who don’t have a regular physician to easily find one and get much-needed treatment.

If you’re unsure about where to start healthcare app development for your hospital, I will outline the process below

Hire expert developers for your next project

Trusted by

Get started Now

Most Physicians Are Already on Their Mobile Devices

This market may be largely untapped, but not for any good reason. Most physicians already use mobile devices as part of their care.  According to a report by Information Week on doctors’ use of smartphones, etc., your healthcare staff is more than ready for a health mobile app.

• 62% of physicians use a tablet at work
• 50% of those physicians use the tablet while they’re treating a patient
• 71% of nurses use their smartphones for operational purposes

Those aren’t just the only reasons. More and more doctors are adopting mobile technology as a way to help their patients. 56% of physicians use mobile apps for healthcare for making medical decisions. 39% say that the medical apps help reduce the amount of time they spend on administrative tasks and 36% of healthcare providers think mobile health apps increase collaboration among their staff.

From a business perspective, developing a mobile app for your hospital can save you money in the long term and streamline your practice.

A Hospital App Can Make Access to Medical Records Easy

If you decide to develop a mobile app for your hospital, it will not just help your patients, but also your staff by freeing up valuable time that they could spend doing other tasks and helping people get better. Doctors use this technology to:

• View ultrasounds and X-rays;
• Access 24/7 medical records;
• Transfer medical records to specialists in a single click, etc.

I’m going to show you some tips for developing health apps for patients and doctors below, but right now you should consider adding Electronic Medical Records (EMR) to your app before you find a hospital mobile app development company to put your ideas into fruition.

Most patients don’t know when to see a doctor and even less know how to access their medical records when they need them. This often involves calling hospitals, finding a person to talk to, being put on hold for long periods of time, being transferred to different departments and then hopefully getting a hand of your records.

This can all be done at once with a mobile EMR app. Your hospital’s app can securely let patients and doctors view their important EMRs at any time.

Bill Paying Doesn’t Have To Be Stressful

Chasing around a patient in order to get them to pay you or chasing around an insurance company that takes a notoriously long time to pay up isn’t really a wise way to spend your time – especially when other people’s lives are at stake.

Dealing with bills isn’t easy for a hospital or a patient. Here’s why:

• It’s stressful for patients to deal with hefty medical costs as it is.
• It’s time-consuming and annoying to track down patients who haven’t paid.
• Payment takes days or weeks depending on the method.

Having a bill pay element in your custom hospital app (which I’ll show you how to get started with below) is almost essential. There are no cons.

Your app can make it a simple two-step process for patients to instantly pay their pills, create a payment plan when their bills are too much, and save you the hassle of having to track them down by sending automatic reminders.

You Can Automate Scheduling

Everyone who‘s ever been to or worked in a hospital knows that every clinic has a different wait time. These wait times can range from a few minutes to a few months. Nobody wants to deal with that! A mobile app for your hospital can quickly optimize scheduling through automation.

Here are just a couple of benefits:

• Patients won’t have to wait in person.
• Patients can easily change appointments.
• Patients can make appointments.
• Patients can find out the wait for a walk-in.

I’m going to show you how to begin developing your app below, but you should definitely add some element of scheduling when you decide to move forward with making an app. No patient wants to wait around for hours – especially if they don‘t feel well.

Your app can tell patients exactly what the wait time would be, help them schedule an appointment, and allow them to change the appointment if needed. This makes your waiting room more efficient and frees up time for your staff to focus on more important matters.

Hire expert developers for your next project

62 Expert dev teams,
1,200 top developers

350+ Businesses trusted
us since 2016

Get started now

Hospital Apps Help Executives Make Informed Decisions

With all the data an app for your hospital will collect, the executives in charge of making major decisions will be able to really know what choices are best. Your app can help executives do the following:

• Create accurate earning business goals
• Monitor the flow of funds
• Monitor the availability of rooms
• Automate everything having to do with insurance companies

Dealing with insurance is a pain in everyone’s neck, so why not automate the process? Developing an app for your hospital can do just that.

In addition to automating payment and insurance-related procedures, an app gives executives a clear, live image of the amount of cash coming in, the availability of rooms, and the like helping them make informed decisions that benefit the hospital as a whole.

One-Time Cost That Streamlines Your Business

Medical app development is costly – there’s no getting around that. But, it is more or less a one-time cost that yields huge benefits. That’s a price that many other hospitals are totally willing to pay. According to one survey:

• 18% of hospitals spend between $500,000 to $1 million on mobile development
• 56% of mobile healthcare apps only take 7 months to complete

Now, $1 million is nothing to scoff at, but if it helps automate some of your staff’s work, save millions of dollars in operations and resources, over time.

it’s totally worth it.

The services and solutions your app will provide are invaluable. Think of all the overtime you won’t have to pay because your staff can purely focus on what’s important instead of getting muddled up in waiting for late appointments, tracking down lost medical records, and more.

Hospital Mobile App Development: How to Do It?

How do you go about developing a hospital mobile application? Let’s examine the steps you need to take. Healthcare application development involves the following:

1. Decide the features of your hospital app

What will you offer to your users? Onboard a competent project manager (PM), an experienced IT architect, and a team of knowledgeable business analysts (BAs).

Conduct detailed discussions with stakeholders and understand how users will use your app. Follow a structured requirements management process and finalize the requirements.

You will likely launch a “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) first to gather market feedback. Based on feedback, you can enhance the app. Use tools like “Pain and gain map” and “Prioritization matrix” to prioritize the features for your MVP.

Need help with these processes? Our guide “5 Tips to Create a Sleek MVP” is just what you need.

2. Formulate a pragmatic hospital app development approach

How do you improve your chances of success? A pragmatic approach will help. Consider the following while formulating such an approach:

• Develop native apps since they offer the best “user experience” (UX), performance, and security.
• Plan to secure the app since it will process sensitive data in the heavily-regulated healthcare industry.
• Utilize cloud computing smartly so that you don’t need to spend time on IT infrastructure management.
• Develop APIs for your core features. You can use 3^rd party APIs for non-core features like “push notifications”.
• Choose the right technology stack.
• Onboard the right people and organize your team for productivity.
• Manage the project purposefully.

Check out our guide “What is the best development approach to guarantee the success of your app?” for more insights.

3. Plan to secure your hospital app

How do you proactively plan to secure your app? Include the following building blocks in your security strategy:

• Hybrid cloud deployment: This will help you to process sensitive health data on a private cloud, while you can use a public cloud for other workloads.
• Modern security tools and techniques like encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), next-generation firewalls, antivirus solutions, and real-time threat intelligence.
• Proactively mitigate application security risks like injection, XML external entities (XXE), broken authentication, etc.
• Include compliance and security testing in your CI/CD pipeline by embracing “Compliance-as-code”.

Need help securing your app? We at DevTeam.Space have the right capabilities, and you can judge that by reading “How to secure your Fintech app”.

4. Use a “Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service” (MBaaS) platform

You would like to focus on developing the front-end and business logic, wouldn’t you? You need help with the mobile backend so that you don’t spend a lot of time building and maintaining it.

Hire expert developers for your next project

Trusted by

Get started Now

Use an MBaaS platform like AWS Amplify. Such platforms manage the cloud infrastructure and persistent storage, moreover, they also make it easier to implement key features like user management and “push notifications”.

As I have explained in “How to choose the best Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS)?”, you can easily integrate APIs when you use an MBaaS platform.

5. Choose the right technology stack

Which technology stack should you choose? Well, I recommend the following:

• Kotlin for native Android development: This modern language helps you to avoid common coding errors, moreover, you can code performant apps with it. Read our guide “Kotlin vs Java: Which is the best choice?” for more insights.
• Swift for native iOS development: Swift is a highly popular language for iOS development since it has powerful features. You can avoid common coding errors and build code performant apps with it, as I have explained in “How to migrate your Objective-C project to Swift?”.
• I assume that you will use RESTful APIs since REST is the de-facto standard for API development. You will need a “Relational Database Management System” (RDBMS), therefore, use PostgreSQL. Choose MongoDB as the document database. Check out our guide “How to build RESTful API for your mobile app?” for more insights.

6. Find the right people and organize your team

Finding competent developers can be hard! You need people with technical skills as well as professionalism, moreover, the ability to collaborate is important.

How do you find such healthcare app development services? Our guide “How to find a good software developer” is just what you need!

Your team needs to deliver sustained value to your users. You need an empowered team, therefore, organize it using the time-tested “Scrum” technique. Our guide “How to build a Scrum development team?” can help you.

How do you manage a hospital app development project effectively? You need to use a data-driven process, and we at DevTeam.Space can help you, thanks to our AI-powered Agile development processes.

Final Thoughts

That’s pretty much all you need to know in order to develop an app for your hospital, which really is necessary to streamline your hospital’s functions.

If you start there and are guided by feedback from real users, your hospital will reduce its operational costs and it will be extremely valuable for your patients. That‘s a meaningful ROI that you can count on.

If you are still looking for competent software developers to assist you with hospital app development, why not get in touch with DevTeam.Space via this quick form.

DevTeam.Space has a community of field-expert software developers who are experienced in building market-competitive software solutions using cutting-edge technologies.

One of our account managers will get back to you to provide assistance with team building, app development planning, implementation, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions