Healthcare Web Development: Full Overview of How-To, Costs, and Compliance

In recent years, digitization has completely changed how people access health services. With the advent of new technologies and innovations in healthcare services, including healthcare web development, most patients begin their journey by searching and comparing online service providers. They expect to find a user-friendly and unique healthcare app, website, or platform to help with their healthcare requests.

The drive to keep up with the digital presence in healthcare has become a pressing need in the market.

So what are the features of healthcare web development? What does it cost, and what details do you need to know?

Benefits of Healthcare Web Development

67% of patients prefer online form submission for the appointment.

So whether you are a startup or a healthcare specialist, a medical web app, website, or online scheduling platform is the first impression you make for your clinic. It is essential to present it in a way that will help you improve conversion and interaction with consumers.

What other benefits can you get with healthcare web development?

Reduce Costs

The first step is to invest in an electronic health records (EHR) system. This system will streamline storing and accessing patient records, eliminating the need to pay staff to manage and update patient records manually.

Another cost-saving measure is to invest in patient scheduling and billing software. It will automate scheduling appointments and managing billing, which will help reduce overhead costs related to staffing and manual data entry.

Finally, consider investing in telehealth technology. Telehealth systems allow patients to receive medical care from their homes, eliminating costly office visits.

Stand Out Among Your Competitors

The key to creating an excellent hospital web application is to focus on the user experience. A good application should be easy to use and navigate and meet the patient’s needs. It should have a straightforward, concise design that is visually appealing and informative.

The content should be well-organized and easy to find while displaying the unique qualities of the hospital, such as its services, staff, and other special features that make you different from your rivals. Add here a secure, reliable platform that ensures the safety and privacy of patient information, and create a website to shadow all the competition.

Optimize Advertising and Promotion

You can use the website to share information about your services, promote special offers, and engage with customers. You can also use social media to reach new patients and build relationships with existing ones.

Finally, you can use paid ads to target the right audience and increase visibility.

These strategies can help you reach more people and improve your overall success. And integrating the site with CRM lets you send emails to clients directly from the system.

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

Who and When Needs to Outsource Web Development

Below are the signals you need to outsource web development.

• You need a website, but you cannot develop it on your own.
• Your business expands and needs help responding to growing customer requests.
• You plan a growth phase with a future site as its integral part.
• The business already has a website, but it is outdated and needs a facelift.
• There is a need to maintain the existing site.

In all these situations, it is worth considering the development and launch of new web tools that will support and promote your healthcare business.

Web Development Features to Consider

Healthcare web applications in the form of a platform or a website can differ according to the types and main and additional features you need.

As the healthcare industry continues to evolve and digital technologies become ubiquitous, healthcare organizations must provide their patients with web applications that offer a comprehensive suite of features to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare services. Below is a list of features advised for implementation within medical web applications.

Simple Search

Patients browse the web for information, so provide a simple search window to help them find all the answers they need. Usually, visitors look for certificates and affiliation information to determine whether your web outlet is authentic before continuing the consultation.

Online Booking Services

Once visitors are impressed with the wealth of information provided on the healthcare web application, it is crucial to provide a seamless and convenient user experience that allows them to easily schedule an appointment with the doctor through a user-friendly entry form. This simple step will not only increase patient satisfaction but also lead to a greater number of appointments being booked. A win-win for the patient and the healthcare organization!

Online Video Consultation

Video consultation has become a feature that directly connects patients to doctors. Through this function, patients can receive quality medical care without leaving home from various health professionals.

Video consultations and telemedicine become the must-have feature for hospital web applications today. You can provide it as a separate service or integrate it with your hospital’s web platform. Ensure you are looking for a web development company that will customize it to suit your business needs. Experts can help you properly implement this feature and provide a hassle-free user interface.

Online Payment System

In addition to appointment scheduling, medical web apps, and online hospital platforms can also be optimized to handle other crucial tasks such as managing payments and bills. To this end, it is important for healthcare organizations to set up a user-friendly system of online payments that is compatible with several payment methods, including credit cards, PayPal, Payoneer, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and others. It can streamline the payment process, ensure your facility has the accounting under control, and provide patients with a convenient and hassle-free experience.

Staff Profiles

In order to build and maintain visitors’ trust, it is crucial for healthcare organizations to effectively market their expertise. Use your healthcare web application to introduce your team of medical professionals and highlight their experience, education, specialization, and other relevant credentials. This kind of Who’s Who can be seamlessly incorporated into the medical app or made a part of your website, allowing patients to easily find and book a visit with a specialist within a single user journey, ultimately enhancing the patient experience.

Integration with Social Media

Integrating social media with your medical web platform is a powerful marketing strategy that can significantly increase customer engagement, expand outreach, and attract new customers. Leveraging the reach of popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, allows healthcare organizations to share educational content, promote services and events, provide customer support, and build strong relationships with patients and the wider community.

Real-Time Analytics

Google Analytics helps determine how well your business is developing. This solution will help business owners track user behavior and analyze traffic sources, web pages, and other marketing data. You can hire an expert to integrate this feature into medical web development, fine-tune it to your business needs and help you get more benefits.

Optionally, you can add a support chatbot, a reception entry module, a prepaid payment module, a video tour of the site, and other convenient and practical features.

HIPAA Compliance

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

As the developers work on the healthcare web applications and hospital systems, they follow cybersecurity enhancements to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to health data:

• Ensuring that only secure passwords are used, containing at least eight characters, special characters, and numbers.
• Implementing additional verification technologies such as biometrics, facial recognition, 2F authentication, etc.
• Creating an automatic termination of each registered session after a certain period of inactivity.
• Using special tracking tools to detect suspicious user behavior and ban it.
• Organizing multiple access privileges where health professionals with different responsibilities have different rights to access health data.

Pay attention to hiring healthcare-experienced web developers, as it will save you time and guarantee you will have the best practices in data encryption, access control, and information management implemented from the start.

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

Make sure not to cut corners with the compliance step. The authorities demand HIPAA and other regulations to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of protected health information (PHI) on medical websites and web applications. If your platform doesn’t meet these, you risk facing the cancellation or legal consequences.

How to Develop a Healthcare Web App?

When it comes to healthcare web application development, there are various approaches you can take, but at Glorium, we follow a structured process consisting of six steps.

We begin with market research to identify the problem we’re solving, whether people are seeking a solution, and if they’re willing to pay for it. Our product managers work alongside the design team to create target personas and conduct user interviews to understand the target audience better.

Next, we move on to design and testing the prototype, which should embody the product idea and basic functionality. We test the prototype with real users and aim to be as objective as possible to avoid initial assumptions affecting the decision-making process.

Designing and developing the web app is the next step, with the UX/UI designer handling the design and the coding part divided into frontend and backend. We choose the technology stack carefully, as it affects the development time, quality, scalability, and cost. Our Solution Architect proposes solutions during the client meeting, ensuring the best choice for all the project’s parts, including app frames, databases, hosting, languages, and libraries.

To comply with HIPAA regulations and ensure data privacy, we implement various measures throughout the development process of our healthcare web applications. For instance, we always back up all client information and use compliant third-party providers that are fully aligned with HIPAA’s requirements. Additionally, we employ data encryption techniques to protect sensitive information from potential breaches or unauthorized access.

The product launch is a crucial stage of medical web development. At this point, we thoroughly analyze and evaluate all the data to identify areas for improvement and to refine the existing functionality. We then use this information to continually test and refine the application, ensuring that it remains up-to-date and fully optimized for the needs of its users.

By doing so, we are able to deliver a product that is not only compliant with HIPAA regulations but also meets the needs and expectations of its users, delivering maximum value and functionality.

It is essential to understand that the medical app is a service rather than a product. It is not enough to «deliver» it to the consumer. Everything has to work as planned, and users must be satisfied with the end product. So developers need to monitor everything and implement changes if necessary.

What Is the Cost of Healthcare Web Development?

Since each business has different requirements, the choice of features and technologies used for the project can affect development costs.

The easiest way to calculate the cost of developing a platform is to «Multiply the total number of development hours by the hourly rate of a web developer.»

The ultimate cost of a healthcare web design and development project is influenced by several factors, such as project complexity, as well as the type and location of the team chosen for the project. It is worth noting that outsourcing to a healthcare web design and development company in the USA is generally more expensive than elsewhere. Opting for a company with the delivery offices in Eastern Europe, such as Glorium, can bring the best value for money. This is because the average hourly rate for web developers in this region is around $50, significantly lower than the average rates of $150 in the USA and $100 in Western Europe.

How to Find Dedicated Developers?

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

Check Quality and Professional Approach

Choosing an outsourcing team is based on its knowledge of technology and on the team members. You want ones who know how to speed up the development process and increase work efficiency and productivity. Find out what tools the company uses to create prototypes and what development methodology, tracking system, and software quality metrics they use in daily processes.

Check References

You can read reviews on their websites and rating platforms like Clutch or Goodfirms. Clutch.co is a helpful site for those looking for reliable IT outsourcing partners. This platform provides objective reviews of each IT outsourcing company and information about their work style.

If you already have a list of potential IT outsourcing partners, another helpful step is to request recommendations from their previous clients. They can show how well-organized companies are, what services and products they provide, how they communicate with clients, etc.

Complete a Full Study

Once you have defined the goals of IT outsourcing, it is time to look for an IT company that meets the needs of your business. It is not an easy thing to do, and you need to do thorough research.

Many companies make the same mistake when searching for their IT partners. They rely only on Google search results. However, Google will not provide answers relevant to your project. You need to conduct a deeper investigation.

Why Choose Glorium Technologies?

The opportunities of the outsourcing team, which is engaged in web development, are limited only by the set of expertise of the team members.

The Glorium team includes various specialists, namely full-stack developers, front-end developers, project managers, designers, etc.

We can develop a healthcare web app of any complexity and integrate it with other systems – payment system, CRM, and email. We can also create a unique web application integrated with your organization’s systems.

Questions You May Have