Leverage custom-built healthcare apps to focus on providing high-quality care
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitization of healthcare services globally. Healthcare apps are increasingly becoming a necessity in medical practice as businesses realize they are instrumental in facilitating care, raising the efficiency of healthcare facilities, and building trust with patients.
Why do so many healthcare apps fail?
Over 90,000 healthcare apps were introduced to the market in 2020 alone, raising the total of available healthcare apps to over 350,000. Yet, many of them simply aren’t effective at creating positive health outcomes and eventually fail. What are the main reasons behind this?
Lack of clear purpose and focus
Businesses looking to launch new mobile healthcare apps struggle to clearly identify the purpose and goals of the app. Patients turn to digital solutions and health apps to support recovery or self-care, and if the healthcare app fails to meet their specific need(s), they simply won’t use it.
Many creators believe that a good mobile app design alone will attract users. In reality, people uninstall an app the minute they realize it doesn’t serve any purpose.
Poor usability
Healthcare apps must be designed with patients’ needs in mind. Strong UX and UI design processes are extremely important in healthcare mobile app development, without them people will struggle to use your solution.
To serve its purpose and help patients instead of being a hassle, a healthcare app must offer maximum convenience of use.
Skipping market research
Lack of understanding of the healthcare environment is yet another common reason why many healthcare mobile app development projects fail.
An experienced healthcare app development company can help businesses shape the right vision of the product and validate it against the market needs and competitors.
What are the steps when developing a healthcare app?
Companies engaging in healthcare app development should identify the relevant problem to be solved. This can be effectively achieved with MVP development and testing.
Businesses must also define their target group, understand its challenges, and respond to them with a health app that is intuitive and easy to use.
That means the app must be available on multiple devices, and offer UX/UI that further maximizes its purpose.
An experienced healthcare mobile app development company can help businesses create an MVP that validates the initial product idea, to ensure that the proposed tool is both meaningful, useful, and fulfil the market needs.
They can also help select the most efficient business model for the healthcare app.
Finally, the medical app must be extensively tested, launched, and monitored for performance so that it can be further developed in accordance with the evolving market needs.
Healthcare app development challenges
Undoubtedly, healthcare apps are vital to improving the quality of medical care and helping to save lives.
However, healthcare mobile app development is marred by numerous challenges that have to be taken into account before delving into the development process. To create an effective healthcare app, consider the following:
Patient data security
A person’s medical data is used by doctors for diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Personal data is also a valuable target for cybercriminals.
Healthcare mobile app development companies must ensure impeccable security mechanisms to protect these sensitive assets.
Integration with existing IT systems
Medical app development requires interoperability across different devices. With that, it crosses the barriers of the healthcare systems and offers brand new capabilities in healthcare support.
Choosing feature sets
Just like with any other web and mobile app development, opting for a healthcare mobile app development company with experience in the field will bring a competitive edge.
Compliance requirements
Healthcare mobile app development services are heavily regulated and must remain in compliance with the relevant national regulatory mechanisms.
What regulations do businesses need to comply with?
The regulations relevant to healthcare app development companies require them to provide high-quality service, securely.
The healthcare sector is among the most tightly regulated segments. Healthcare app development companies have to take into account various local and regional measures.
In the US, healthcare app development companies must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for every system that makes use of wearables. US healthcare app development companies need to obtain FDA clearance for every healthcare app that diagnoses, facilitates treatment, cure, or mitigation of a health problem.
In the EU, the GDPR requires companies to protect the personal data of all individuals. This, of course, includes medical data. Companies may be fined heavily for data leaks, so investing in robust security mechanisms is a must.
In the UK, healthcare apps are regulated with two mechanisms. They are subject to Medical Devices Regulations and the General Product Safety Regulations 2005. Healthcare apps must also be registered with the Care Quality Commission.