In recent years, hospital mobile app development has emerged as a critical tool in the healthcare industry, providing patients with convenient and accessible healthcare services. These apps offer features such as telemedicine, patient engagement, wearables integration, AI-powered features, blockchain technology, and health monitoring, which can significantly enhance the quality of care and patient experience.
Hospital mobile apps can improve lives drastically for patients and doctors in many ways – can provide immediate updates on health status, reduce the waiting period, and relevant diagnosis and treatment.
One of the app market’s fastest-growing segments, the healthcare app market is anticipated to reach USD 236 billion by 2026.
In this blog, we will explore the benefits, development process, hospital mobile app technology trends, challenges, etc.
Why do we need a hospital mobile app?
1. Information accessibility
Every hospital maintains a massive number of medical records and other sensitive patient data. The development of hospital mobile apps can help doctors and patients save time filling out forms, searching for analyses, and paying fees. All of that information can be saved within this app and accessed by both parties at any time.
2. Changing patient care
With this kind of mobile app, hospitals can shift the entire treatment process from disease treatment to disease prevention. Smartphone sensors and other wearable devices can monitor a patient’s health throughout the day and provide that information to the attending doctor. It will aid in the management of numerous chronic diseases by predicting their occurrence based on the data collected.
3. Improving patient-healthcare interaction
Patient participation in the process of treatment is as crucial as treatment itself. Many useful features can be incorporated into hospital mobile apps to interact with various devices and track health metrics for patients. Based on this, it can be logically concluded that increased patient involvement can positively impact their treatment, which is a promising sign for physicians.
4. Patient retention
An adaptive website and a hospital app differ primarily in the aspect of personalization. By developing a hospital app, the owner can incorporate features that enhance patient engagement and involvement. If the app stands out from competitors, includes valuable information, is user-friendly, and offers all necessary features, the impact on the brand can be significant.
6 hospital mobile app development technology trends
You must be informed of current trends before you begin creating your healthcare app because they affect both the popularity of your app with users and its ability to compete in the Mhealth industry.
1. Blockchain technology
Blockchain is being explored as a potential solution for secure and efficient management of electronic health records (EHRs). Hospital mobile apps are beginning to incorporate blockchain technology to provide users with secure access to their EHRs, and to allow for easy sharing of medical information between healthcare providers.
2. Data on health generated by patients
A little over 64% of American people frequently use an app to monitor their health. Patient-generated health data is growing in popularity as a result. These mobile applications gather user data from wearables and mobile devices, including heart rate and other data. Due to the fact that app users are also creating healthcare information about themselves, such apps digitalize patients’ medical records and enable obtaining updated data on the patient’s health in real-time. These details may consist of:
- User biometric information
- Information in-depth on customs, way of life, etc.
- signs of the illness
- Prescribed medical care
These applications have several positive clinical effects. Apps that collect data from patients bridge the information gap between patients and medical facilities, enabling doctors to make more informed decisions and consult with other professionals.
3. Telemedicine
Hospital mobile apps development are increasingly incorporating telemedicine features to provide remote consultations and virtual visits. Telehealth can be used in any area of medicine, including diagnosis and treatment as well as behavioral health therapy services and psychiatry.
Telemedicine is useful for the following services in addition to enabling long-distance contacts:
- Care Advice Reminders
- Education Intervention Monitoring
- Even confessions made remotely.
4. Geolocation
93% of respondents said they relied on their maps or GPS navigation in 2022; 5% said they used it daily. Because it enables users to locate the closest pharmacies and hospitals, geolocation is also employed in Mhealth apps. Additionally, geolocation is useful for delivering information that is more specifically tailored, such as:
- Displaying local disease statistics, information, maps, and recommendations
- Delivering specialized health education
- Getting updated on regional health threats and risks
- Looking up names of local medications and their costs (in local currency)
- Receiving medical updates that are local to the app user
- Obtaining details about nearby accidents, natural disasters, and other events.
Thus, mHealth apps with geolocation could be utilized for:
- Locating the closest clinics or hospitals depending on a user’s location and medical requirements
- Giving driving instructions and real-time traffic data to app users
- Assisting ambulance and rescue crews in precisely and swiftly locating and tracking individuals who are experiencing a medical emergency, who have been hurt, or who have gone missing, as well as for ambulance fleet management
- In the event that a medical emergency requiring attention is discovered, mobile patient monitoring and automated emergency calls with precise patient location will be made.
- Obtaining information on an individual’s physical reactions in various contexts and locales while sampling real-time data on environmental exposure to irritants and contaminants.
5. Disease prevention
Healthcare is one of those fields where delays could result in fatalities. Machine learning algorithms, hospitals use artificial intelligence, and neural networks that perform more in-depth short-term prediction analysis to increase the usefulness of illness detection and prevention. Compared to human scientists or medical professionals, the algorithms are significantly faster and more accurate in data cleaning. This is how it goes:
- To provide an accurate recognition, the neural network absorbs as much information as feasible.
- Then, using various filters, the neural network classifies the input and finds abnormalities.
- The information is then added to the patient’s health record after being confirmed by medical experts using databases that are accessible.
The following advantages result from applying machine learning neural networks to illness detection and prevention:
- Streamline the diagnosis process to make it quicker, more effective, and less expensive.
- Reduce the reliance on different medical specialists during the diagnosing process
- shorten the time it takes to receive clinical test results
- Boost the precision of clinical test outcomes
These technologies are especially helpful for time-sensitive disorders like the early identification of skin cancer. A lengthy sequence of clinical tests, analyses, and histological examinations that take months to complete are typically required for a diagnosis. The accuracy of the results as well as the efficiency of the treatment are both considerably increased by the neural network’s ability to produce test results in a couple of hours.
6. Reminders for medication
Sadly, statistics show that only 50% of chronic disease medication regimens are followed by patients. Hospital medication reminder apps can therefore address this issue. These apps frequently contain:
- Name of patient
- Information about every drug
- Dosage, adverse effects, and responses
- When and how to administer medication to the patient.
The app uses push alerts to remind the patient when it’s time to take their prescriptions. Hospitals are able to monitor both regular and take-as-needed medication intake in this way.
How to develop hospital medical apps
A comprehensive and thoughtfully created application can cover the entire hospital ecosystem. In this situation, it’s imperative to remain with native app development, which requires your mobile application engineers to build a unique product from scratch for each operating system.
To help you understand the process before it begins, we’ve listed the key phases of developing a healthcare app below.
Step 1: Select the type of hospital mobile app
There are numerous mobile apps for hospitals, each with a particular set of capabilities and geared toward a different user base and set of objectives. As a result, you can choose from one of the top hospital app kinds listed below to construct your app:
- Patient information, medical records, and treatment plans may all be kept in one place with the help of hospital applications that serve as a medical reference and database.
- Applications for doctors that allow them to network, exchange experiences, build communities, solicit advice, etc.
- Medical professionals may gather test data, track a patient’s progress, and more with the use of health tracking apps.
- Using a hospital appointment app, hospitals can streamline paperwork and arrange patient appointments more easily.
- In order to book a live chat or a video conference with a doctor, a patient can use doctor-on-demand apps, which function as two-sided markets.
Step 2: Engage a team to design a healthcare app.
The major objective of this stage is to make a thorough list of your projects’ functional and non-functional requirements. What distinguishes them from one another? Lets see.
- Functional requirements outline the operation and behavior of your mobile application. Functional requirements illustration:
- With the patient in a private chat, the software enables doctors to share uploaded information like X-rays and test results.
- Information regarding your app’s performance characteristics is included in non-functional criteria. The doctor is only able to upload files up to 100 Mb in size in JPG, PDF, and Word formats.
The development team then separates and prioritizes the features of your hospital mobile app based on your project requirements and begins working on your project.
Step 3 : Develop the hospital app MVP
The challenge of creating a medical clinic app appears to be pretty challenging. Typically, we advise our clients to create an MVP (minimum viable product) before starting work on such a massive project.
The main characteristic of this approach is to build an app with the bare minimum necessary features and to continue updating and optimizing it after the release. Costs associated with developing hospital mobile apps are significantly decreased by using this strategy.
Step 4: Release your app and get user reviews.
It’s time to publish the hospital mobile app MVP on app stores so that your patients can download it.
Inquire of your patients about how well the mobile app works, how convenient it is to use, and what features you should add next. This will help you determine whether or not the patient’s expectations are met by your app.
How much does it cost to develop a hospital-specific mobile app?
The cost to develop a hospital-specific mobile app can vary widely depending on various factors such as the complexity of the app, the number of features and functionalities, the platform (iOS or Android), the development team’s experience, and location.
According to industry estimates, the cost to develop a hospital mobile app can range from $40,000 to $500,000, and can take anywhere from six months to a year or more to develop. However, these are just rough estimates, and the actual cost can vary significantly based on the specific requirements and scope of the project.
Some of the key cost factors in developing a hospital mobile app include:
- Design and development: This involves the creation of the app’s user interface, coding, testing, and debugging.
- Backend infrastructure: This includes database management, APIs, and data storage.
- Integration with third-party services: This includes integrating with electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine platforms, and other third-party services.
- Quality assurance and testing: This involves ensuring that the app functions properly on different devices and operating systems and meets user expectations.
- App maintenance and updates: Regular maintenance and updates are essential to ensure that the app continues to function properly and meets changing user needs.
Hospital mobile app development challenges
In order to support diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, and care, including recovery therapy, hospital mobile app development businesses must offer software solutions for continuous health monitoring, disease alerts at early stages, as well as for help in these processes. Additionally, it’s crucial to incorporate continuous health monitoring because without it, the user won’t be able to access accurate health information from the app. How is it possible to offer this process?
As mobile Internet becomes quicker and more reliable and as its parameters get closer to those of a fixed connection, the decision is made in its favor. At the same time, a large number of people have cellphones with always-on, location-independent Internet access.
Under such circumstances, there is a chance that health data will be continuously transmitted to a server for processing or to notify the attending physician. The software can immediately contact an ambulance in emergency situations.
The fact that apps are progressively going to the “cloud” is another problem with web technologies in hospital app development. As a result, patients can successfully synchronize several downloads and integrate them with medical devices. A thorough survey can be carried out by gathering information from various applications in one location (application medical card). Google Health is a well-known internet service for keeping personal electronic medical records and is used for many medical purposes.
Conclusion
Hospital mobile apps have the potential to improve the delivery of healthcare services and enhance patient outcomes. By leveraging the latest technologies and best practices in app development, hospitals and healthcare organizations can provide innovative solutions and deliver better care to their patients.
Innovative app development solutions are provided by Arkenea, one of the industry’s early adopters of cutting-edge technology including artificial intelligence. To discuss your project, get in touch with one of our consultants right now.