Healthcare Website Development: Trends, Tech Stack, Cost, Features

What’s the first thing you look for when you’re searching for available services, be it healthcare or other industries? Most likely, everyone would answer that they’re looking for the company’s website.

This common answer emphasizes that a website is essential for all businesses, including those in the medical industry. It’s a form of information delivery that builds trust and creates a space where your users may ask questions and connect with your representatives.

CDC published a report at the end of 2022, just as we were more comfortably adapting to the pandemic, and noted that 58.5% of adults have looked for remote and online medical services. What’s more interesting is that, in 2024, Google published a report stating that 5% of all Google searches are healthcare-related. This can give you an approximate image of how many people are looking to receive the services that you provide.

According to what we just discussed, medical website development is an essential process to bringing your services to your loyal and potential audiences.

In this article, we want to explore some of the most interesting aspects of healthcare websites, their development, features, timelines, costs, and more. So, let’s dive in and learn more about healthcare web development.

Benefits of Healthcare Web Development

So, we already briefly discussed that patients prefer online appointments over physical visits. But what are the other benefits of healthcare website development, and what do they do for your medical establishment?

A healthcare website can reduce costs

You might think that spending money on healthcare website development services might not insinuate cost reduction. Yes, you’ll have to spend some money, but in the long term, the medical website will save you unnecessary costs and extra administrative work.

For example, electronic health records (EHR) can simplify data storage and management. EHR is a type of medical web app that mostly faces healthcare providers and facilities (isn’t developed for the end users) and can help you reduce your staff’s workload and improve patient outcomes.

Patient scheduling and billing software, which can be used by your patients, can also reduce long-term costs. These solutions offer easy substitution for administrative work. One more solution to think about is telehealth systems, which also make it more comfortable for your clients to book appointments online, chat with doctors, and reduce hospital visits and resource use overall.

Medical website will help you stand out among competitors

One of the best things that comes with healthcare website development is the differentiation from competitors. Many medical organizations have healthcare websites, but not all of them offer user-friendly interfaces and intuitive experiences, so developing a custom one for your business will help you stand out among competitors.

Make sure that you opt for a user-friendly medical website design, offer full information about your medical practice, make sure the users know their medical data is safe and you adhere to regulations, work on search engine optimization, and voila – you have a successful and efficient healthcare website that helps you stand out among seas of competitors.

A healthcare website helps promote your services

Having a healthcare website means you can promote your services, connect with your audience, promote special offers, and use social media integration for better reach.

Healthcare website development also allows you to pay for the ads and present your services to Google’s users. But there’s more! If you develop a CRM that helps you collect and organize customer data, you can send out personalized promotion emails, offer custom-made sales and gifts to your users, and overall create a friendly experience.

Our company specializes in product development, particularly in the healthcare industry. Our skilled professionals have completed many successful healthcare developments. This enables us to develop more quickly and efficiently while taking into account all current best practices for security and interface usability. Meanwhile, our developers’ work is less expensive than that of similar developers in Western countries.

A better understanding of development methodologies and marketing strategies for startups and businesses in healthcare allows us to choose the most optimal project implementation scheme, allowing clients to complete the project more efficiently.

Oleh Puhach

Delivery Manager in Growth, Glorium Technologies

How to Make Sure You Need Healthcare Web Development?

Developing a healthcare website may sometimes seem like an intuitive move to make. However, some companies hesitate to invest in the development process, postpone it, or opt for an off-the-shelf solution. In this section of the article, we’re going to give you a little guide on deciding whether you need healthcare website development or not.

These are all the best reasons to build a medical website for your company:

• You need to improve your company’s professional credibility
• It’s the best time to make your services and resources more accessible to your patients
• Your marketing team recognizes the need to work on brand visibility
• Your company is ready to offer remote services and reach a new audience pool

If you’re unsure whether you need a medical website or not, we have experts ready to connect with you and answer all of your questions. You can easily schedule a free consultation with us and talk to our representatives, who will guide you.

When Do You Need to Outsource Web Development?

We have already mentioned off-the-shelf solutions in the article. Ready-made healthcare websites do their work, but we recommend customized websites for scalability, growth, and personalization. Off-the-shelf websites and build-by-block websites are good when you’re starting out, but what happens when your requirements grow? Your medical website should be able to grow alongside your business.

Hiring an in-house team for your web development is a plausible option, but we recommend hiring professional healthcare website development services.

Here’s how you know you may need to outsource web development:

• You want to develop an advanced medical website but don’t have the right skillset in-house
• Your business has grown and has more administrative workflow; hence, it needs a personalized system
• You need a new healthcare website design since you have an outdated site
• Your management team needs more time to focus on core business processes
• You have budget constraints, and hiring skilled professionals for an in-house team is challenging

Must-Have Features for Healthcare Web Development

What makes healthcare website development worth it? The essential features we put in them, whether it’s a website or a medical web app. These features and functionalities can make or break your website, and it’s essential to integrate the accurate ones correctly.

The healthcare industry is a complex sector and must follow technological improvements to the tooth. Healthcare firms offer their customers a wide range of healthcare services, and a well-functional medical website can make it easier to deliver these services.

Registration and navigation

Registration options make it easier for users to access your healthcare services, create their profiles, and store their medical data. Additionally, medical website development includes a clear and user-friendly navigation system that will guide your website visitors simply. These features are necessary to create a comfortable experience for users on your medical website.

Patient portal and notifications

We mentioned registration above as a necessary feature. Registration is important to create a patient portal, and patient portals are necessary for a comfortable experience. Users can build a personalized patient portal, store necessary information there, and personalize your healthcare website design for themselves. Including a notification system is also necessary for offering users customized information and deals.

Telemedicine features

One of the reasons for medical website development is to include telemedicine features and offer patients more accessible services and healthcare providers comfortable work. These features include online appointment booking, video and chat consultations with doctors, symptom trackers, and more.

Accessibility features

Not adding accessibility features to your medical web app will restrict access to a wide pool of patients and customers. Such features include keyboard navigation, text-to-speech functionality, and multilingual support to give access to users who have impaired abilities or require remote services for other reasons.

Social media and interactive tools

Aside from the necessary and must-have features, we also have additional or advanced features that you can add to your healthcare web application. Social media integration is one of these features. This integration allows patients to interact with the community and you to grow engagement. Interactive tools like calculators, gamified elements, and symptom checkers also make it possible to improve engagement and foster a sense of connection and support.

AI chatbots and virtual assistants

Remote and online services often require 24/7 hour support, and having a support chatbot on your healthcare website is convenient for both your patients and your administrative staff. Patients can interact with AI chatbots and virtual assistants to book video consultations and real-life visits while your administrative staff takes care of the important processes.

API and EHR integration

Medical website development often includes API and EHR integration. Third-party APIs give users comfort and improve accessibility. Electronic health record systems, on the other hand, reduce the risk of errors and provide healthcare providers with complete and accurate information about their patients and their data.

HIPAA Compliance

We can’t talk about medical website development without discussing HIPAA compliance and medical industry regulations. Building a healthcare website requires professional attention strictly for compliance reasons.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a set of rules for sharing personal medical information and protecting information from unauthorized access.

No matter what you decide, whether you are hiring an in-house medical web development team or working with professional service providers, this is essential information you must have. Let’s follow the example of how our developers work; they ensure that our clients’ healthcare website is protected from unauthorized data access by following cybersecurity enhancements:

• They ensure that users of the medical website or the app are using secure passwords (eight characters, special characters, numbers, etc.)
• They implement additional protection measures like facial recognition, 2F authentication, and so on
• They build sites and apps that automatically dispose of old chats and sensitive information
• They build tracking tools that allow healthcare website holders to monitor suspicious user behavior and ban it if necessary
• They ensure that data can be accessed by certain medical professionals

This list highlights how important it is to hire professional medical website developers for your web development project. You’ll work with professionals who have extensive practices in healthcare website development, regulations, and functionalities.

When developing healthcare projects, you must comply with HIPAA and GDPR. These are the main standards governing software development for the industry. HIPAA stands for the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects against disclosure (without patients’ consent or knowledge) of their privacy and health records. The software must be HIPAA compliant in the following ways:

• User authorization
• Data access control
• Authorization monitoring
• Backup
• Error correction plan
• Emergency mode
• Automatic exit from the system
• Data encryption and decryption.

Before our team gets to work on a healthcare project, all developers are trained in HIPAA Compliance.

Valerii Bobrovsky

Developer, Glorium Technologies

We recommend to be cautious with HIPAA compliance and don’t cut corners when developing medical websites. You may face legal consequences or additional risks if you don’t adhere to medical industry regulations.

Medical Website Development in 6 Steps

We wanted to add a little guide to the medical website development to help you understand how the process goes. This will guide you through both in-house and outsourced web development collaborations. We provide healthcare website development services that include specific steps before we arrive at the final product. Let’s follow our process briefly to introduce you to our development process:

The first step of a medical website development project (every project, in fact) is to do thorough research. Our healthcare web development team consists of various professionals, including market researchers and UX professionals.

We start our development process by learning about your audience and end users of your web app. This information helps us pinpoint all the pain points of your audience and build your healthcare website with the most suitable features.

The next step involves medical website design creation, testing, and prototyping. At this stage, we embody your product idea and offer you the first look. Once the prototype is ready, we offer it to typical end users and provide feedback about its performance. If necessary, we make further changes before developing the full solution.

This step is where we work on a user-friendly healthcare website design for the final product. Our UX/UI designer follows the feedback we received from the prototyping stage and crafts the design. Our developers choose the tech stack to align with the predicted development time, quality, scalability, and cost.

In order to meet the HIPAA requirements and protect the patient information, we apply a number of the measures at every stage of the healthcare web application development. For example, we do not only store any client information and use third-party apps that are HIPAA compliant. Also, we use encryption methods in order to prevent the loss of important data or its accessing by unauthorized persons.

At this stage, we finally have the full product ready. It’s compliant with regulations, has a user-friendly design, and has all the necessary features. This is one of the most important steps of medical web development since launching the product gives us an opportunity to monitor its performance at full strength and gather necessary data.

No application or website is perfect, and end-user feedback will provide us with some guidance. We use this information to further improve our software and update functionalities and features. This is not only necessary for user satisfaction, but also adheres to HIPAA and other regulations, as they often change.

Usually, our collaboration doesn’t end with the product launch. If you’re looking for a healthcare web development partner to outsource the development, make sure to connect with a company that offers post-launch support and maintenance.

What Is the Cost of Healthcare Web Development?

One of the most influential elements of the decision is development costs. It’s a complex subject to discuss in the article, but we can give you an approximate estimate. The price depends on the number of features, the complexity of the software, and the hourly rates of the developers.

One of the easiest ways to calculate the price (directly) is to multiply the total number of development hours by the hourly rate of a web developer. But there are more factors affecting the price, depending on which development type you choose.

The total cost of a healthcare web design and development project depends on the project’s complexity and the type and location of the team working on the project. It is also important to understand that healthcare web design and development services in the USA are costly as compared to other countries.

Choosing a company with delivery offices in Eastern Europe, such as Glorium Technologies, can be the most cost-effective. This is because the going rate for web development in this particular region is about $50 per hour, while the average rate in the USA is $150, and in Western Europe, it is $100.

How to Find Healthcare Website Developers?

Finding healthcare website developers is a challenging task, especially if you’re looking for professionals with extraordinary skill sets. In-house hiring will take a lot of time and money, and hiring professional service providers will require you to go through the assessment process.

Many IT outsourcing companies offer services in different ways. But how to find a dedicated outsourcing partner that can provide high quality?

To be sure you’re working with professionals, you need to go through an evaluation process:

Check quality and professional approach

At Glorium Technologies, we provide free consultations without commitment to make sure our potential clients get to know our processes and development methodology.

Don’t underestimate this step. Make sure you talk to the company representatives and ask all the questions you need to ask. Go through their website and clientele to learn more about their professional approach.

Check references

You can read the reviews on the company’s website as well as on platforms such as Clutch and Goodfirms. Clutch – the website is beneficial for people who are in search of possible IT outsourcing companies. Here, you’ll find the reviews of each IT outsourcing company and the information about the company’s work approach.

If you already have a list of the possible IT outsourcing  partners, another useful step could be to ask for recommendations from the partners’ previous clients. This will help in showing how well organized companies are, the various services and products they offer, how they relate with their clients and many more.

Complete a full research

After identifying the objectives of IT outsourcing, the next step is to search for an IT company that will suit the business needs. It is not that simple, and one has to work hard to gather relevant information.

It is unfortunate that many firms encounter the same fault when in search of their IT partners. They only use Google search results. However, Google will not give you answers that are pertinent to your project. You have to dig further.

How Can Glorium Technologies Help You?

We have been developing healthcare software for over 14 years and have the pleasure of building products for many insightful clients. We can help you build your healthcare website with flexible collaboration models, full support, and an advanced tech stack.

Our teams include full-stack developers, front-end developers, project managers, designers, etc.

Schedule your free consultation with us today and talk to our experts, who can help you guide you through your success roadmap.

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