How to Build a Telemedicine App: A Complete Guide for Startups
Updated March 19, 2024
Telemedicine is solving today’s problems, like making healthcare more accessible and reducing inequality. According to Fortune Business Insight the telemedicine market volume promises to reach $559.52 billion by 2027. Having your platform for the provision of medical services is not just important but vital. So let’s start from the beginning. What is telemedicine, and how to develop a telemedicine app?
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How a Telemedicine App Works
Telemedicine involves providing medical services remotely using digital technologies, including applications. Many people interested in how to build a telemedicine app need to understand the difference between telemedicine and telehealth. Both belong to the health IT category but differ in capabilities.
Telehealth platforms cover a more comprehensive range of services. These include telemedicine, education, tele-pharmaceuticals, and other non-clinical services eligible for remote delivery. Telemedicine focuses on clinical applications. There are several modes of medical services available through a telemedicine app:
| Mode type | What is it? | When is it used? |
| Video conferencing | An interactive mode for remote viewing of patients in real-time. | Initial examination and medical history record, diagnosis confirmation, post-traumatic rehabilitation monitoring, and psychotherapy. |
| Consultation | A mode for providing treatment recommendations in voice, text, or asynchronous video format (when data is recorded and transmitted in advance). | Adjusting the treatment plan, advising on medication, prescribing tests, and monitoring after hospital discharge. |
| Prescription issuance | A mode for issuing electronic prescriptions. | A mode for issuing electronic prescriptions. Prescribing home care prescription drugs based on the patient’s electronic medical history and examination results. Here’s how a telemedicine app works: the patient creates an account, searches for a doctor based on symptoms, pays for services after consultation, and receives receipts. |
A telemedicine app can be universal or specialized. A universal telemedicine app is, in fact, a marketplace with the services of various doctors, usually self-employed. A specialized telemedicine app belongs to a clinic. The benefits of deploying a telemedicine app, proven by practical application, are hard to overestimate for doctors and patients.
Why Build a Telemedicine Platform: Benefits for Doctors and Patients
Telemedicine app development and telehealth applications are poised to redefine the future of healthcare, offering a platform to contribute to a healthier and more interconnected world. While the endeavor of telemedicine app development presents formidable challenges, with a focused team and a clear vision, it represents an opportunity to spearhead transformative change in healthcare delivery, ultimately improving lives worldwide.
Providing medical care through telemedicine apps benefits everyone: patients have free access to healthcare, and doctors can effectively manage their time. Here’s how telemedicine apps improve medical businesses’ outcomes.
Data centralization and monitoring
Telemedicine apps have a monitoring system and a database: all patient health information gets kept in the electronic record format (EHR). Access to EHR improves treatment efficiency and reduces the risk of medical errors.
Schedule optimization
Industry statistics indicate that 20% of doctors work 60-80 hours weekly. Moreover, 15% of doctors admit they are susceptible to depression, so their working capacity decreases.
Telemedicine apps also help in time management and workload distribution.
Automation of administrative processes
By building a telemedicine or telehealth app, doctors can automate workflows, minimize filing reports, and maintain medical records routinely.
Service quality assurance
With remote services, doctors can spend more time on each patient and prescribe treatment faster, positively impacting the quality of the services.
About 60% noted telemedicine’s effectiveness in serving patients from cities, suburbs, and villages. Almost 70% of specialists expressed a desire to expand the use of telemedicine in their practice.
Here’s how telemedicine apps improve patients’ convenience:
- Search for specialized professionals. Patients can search for doctors all over the world. Telemedicine services are beneficial when no specialists in the patient’s city of residence are available, and treatment is urgently needed.
- Comprehensive home treatment. The doctor assesses the patient’s condition, prescribes examinations, and makes prescriptions. The results of the SingleCare survey have shown that 69% of patients use telemedicine to treat common illnesses (flu, colds, allergies) and 44% for chronic ones.
- Scheduled examinations and health monitoring. More than 65% of patients are remotely monitored after hospitalization, and about 35% must undergo annual examinations. Telemedicine saves time on trips to the clinic and waiting in line.
- Access to medical data. Patients can view their medical records saved in electronic documents and send them to specialized specialists and family members using the application.
The same SingleCare survey shows that 78% of patients are satisfied with telemedicine services. At the same time, 42% of respondents noted that they saved time, and 36% said that the online meeting was successful. Therefore, it is no surprise that the healthcare industry is now in high demand in the mobile app development market.
Top Features of the Telemedicine Apps
Features for a doctor appointment scheduling app include personalized calendar integration, appointment reminders, and automated appointment confirmations. Additionally, the app should offer remote scheduling for telehealth visits, provide a secure patient portal, and allow for easy management of patient records.
The “total package” app should be able to accept payments and integrate with billing systems and offer a way to book recurring appointments with patient profiles. Finally, the app should provide physicians with analytics and reporting tools to help them understand patient trends and make better decisions.
Doctor’s Profile
In the doctor’s profile feature, doctors can register and provide detailed information about themselves, including their specialization, competencies, and experience. This section serves as a comprehensive overview for patients, helping them make informed decisions when selecting a healthcare provider. Doctors can showcase their credentials, areas of expertise, educational background, certifications, and professional affiliations, thereby establishing trust and credibility with potential patients.
Calendar
The calendar feature enables doctors to efficiently manage their schedules, facilitating the scheduling of online meetings, monitoring appointments, and accommodating changes based on current requests. This feature enhances time management and organization, allowing doctors to optimize their availability and ensure seamless coordination with patients. With intuitive scheduling capabilities, doctors can avoid double bookings, set reminders for upcoming appointments, and maintain a structured workflow for delivering patient care.
Access to Electronic Health Records (EHR)
Access to the database feature grants doctors the ability to view electronic medical records (EMRs) and obtain comprehensive information about their patients. By accessing EHRs, doctors can review patient histories, diagnoses, medications, lab results, and treatment plans.
This insight empowers doctors to make well-informed decisions, provide personalized care, and streamline the diagnostic and treatment process. Additionally, seamless integration with EHR systems ensures data accuracy, confidentiality, and compliance with healthcare regulations.
Communication Channels
Communication channels serve as vital conduits for doctors to interact with patients, facilitating seamless and convenient communication via text messages, voice calls, or video sessions. This feature enables doctors to address patient inquiries, provide medical advice, discuss treatment options, and offer ongoing support remotely. By leveraging multiple communication modalities, doctors can accommodate diverse patient preferences and effectively engage with individuals across different communication platforms, ensuring timely and effective communication regardless of location or circumstance.
Document Exchange
The document exchange feature streamlines the process of prescribing medications and issuing referrals for examinations, enhancing collaboration between doctors and patients. Doctors can electronically transmit prescriptions and referrals to pharmacies and diagnostic centers, eliminating the need for paper-based documentation and facilitating efficient coordination of healthcare services. This feature ensures accuracy, security, and traceability in document exchange, while also enhancing patient convenience by expediting access to necessary medications and diagnostic tests.
Payment Management
Payment management functionality enables doctors to receive payment for services rendered through a built-in payment gateway, streamlining the billing process and enhancing financial transparency. Patients can conveniently make payments for consultations, treatments, and other healthcare services directly through the app, with automatic generation and sending of receipts for completed transactions.
This feature simplifies payment reconciliation, reduces administrative burdens, and ensures timely and secure processing of payments, enhancing the overall patient experience and facilitating efficient revenue management for healthcare providers.
Features for a Patient’s App
Features of a doctor appointment scheduling app for patients include being able to quickly and easily schedule appointments, view upcoming appointments, receive reminders, and view past visits history. This is all in addition to being able to contact the doctor’s office directly from the app.
Furthermore, patients should also be able to connect with their care team through the app and receive notifications about health tips and other important updates. The must-have features for the patients are:
Registration
Patients can create an account within the app, providing personal information for secure storage. Additionally, the app incorporates robust security measures such as 2-Step Verification to safeguard patient data and account integrity.
Health Records
Access to medical records, including Electronic Health Records (EHR), is granted exclusively to patients, ensuring privacy and confidentiality. Patients can securely view their medical history, diagnoses, medications, and treatment plans within the app, empowering them to take an active role in managing their healthcare.
Calendar
Appointment management is streamlined with synchronized integration with Google Calendar, allowing patients to schedule, view, and manage appointments seamlessly. Notifications for upcoming appointments ensure patients stay informed and organized, reducing the risk of missed appointments and improving overall patient satisfaction.
Geolocation
The app utilizes geolocation technology to identify and display nearby medical and pharmaceutical facilities. This feature enables patients to locate healthcare providers, pharmacies, and other relevant services based on their current location, enhancing accessibility and convenience.
Search
Patients can easily search for specialists based on various criteria such as profile, location, language, or rating. This feature facilitates informed decision-making by allowing patients to find healthcare providers that best meet their specific needs and preferences.
Communication Channels
The app offers multiple communication channels, including video (RTMP, WebRTC), chat, and voice, enabling patients to connect with their care team effortlessly. Whether seeking medical advice, discussing treatment options, or scheduling follow-up appointments, patients can communicate with healthcare providers conveniently and securely within the app.
Payments
Transactions for healthcare services are facilitated through built-in payment gateways (as PayPal). Patients can securely make payments for appointments, treatments, and other services directly within the app, streamlining the billing process and ensuring financial transactions are conducted with ease and transparency.
Rating
Patients can provide feedback and evaluate the quality of service through a built-in feedback system. This feature enables patients to share their experiences, providing valuable insights for healthcare providers to continuously improve service quality and patient satisfaction.
How to Build a Telemedicine Platform: 4 Stages
The telemedicine app software development process can be divided into 4 stages.
Initiation
- Project potential assessment and business analysis: Competitors are analyzed, the target audience is determined, and user characters, User Story, and Customer Journey Map are created.
- Study of software requirements: The requirements for the telemedicine application, industry regulations (HIPAA, HITECH, etc.), and standards to be followed are defined.
- Function prioritization: A set of valuable functions for business users (doctors) and target audiences (patients) is being compiled.
It is crucial to create a minimum viable product (MVP) with the main features to test your idea in real life and validate that there is demand for it. Only after being able to sell MVP is it worth investing in further development and improvement.
We come across cases when founders don`t get enough interest from a market to their MVP, and instead of accepting it and switching to working on another idea, they invest tons of resources into developing some extra features to make this product more appealing. It is a core mistake as if the big idea isn`t successful, no additional functionality will improve it. So, MVP is needed to ensure you are moving in the right direction.
Anton KumechkoProject Manager, Glorium Technologies
Planning and Architecture Design
- Planning: reproducing the basic logic of the application, distributing functionality across screens, and setting up logical connections between screens to ensure a high-quality user experience. It is executed based on custom scripts and a client path.
- Design: rendering all screens and graphic interface elements (buttons, logos, icons, fonts, and animations) based on the brand book to form user-friendly application logic.
Development and Testing
- Development: building architecture, data exchange structures, organizing a database, developing server scripts, creating an admin panel, deploying and configuring logging systems, the layout of screens and animations, setting up logic, implementing API functionality, and adapting to Android and iOS platforms.
- Testing and bug fixing: detection of bugs and inconsistencies, elimination using Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Bug Fixing methods.
Certification and Launch
- Certification: adaptation of software to state standards and norms. For example, HIPAA in the US, 1995/46/EC (data protection), and 2002/58/EC/IEC 62304 (electronic data privacy) in Europe, the general regulation of the GDPR.
- Deployment: placing a finished application in the App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft Store.
The number and specificity of modern technologies implemented in the application are one of the factors that determine the final development cost.
| Technology | How is it used? | What is the result? |
| AI | Automating the interaction with the application and improving the user experience. | Natural language processing and speech recognition technology. |
| Internet of Things | Connection of intelligent wearable devices (fitness trackers, Thermal Stress Meters, etc.), which collect data about the patient’s condition and transmit it to the doctor. | Remote patient monitoring, reminders about medication intake, emergency prevention. |
| Big data | Collecting and analyzing many electronic medical records. | Making accurate diagnoses, conducting examinations, prescribing medications and drawing up individual treatment plans. |
| Blockchain | Storing medical data on secure servers and exchanging files in an encrypted format over distributed networks. | Guarantee of 100% confidentiality. |
Telemedicine App Development Cost
It is easy to calculate the cost of software development if you know the approximate time to complete the project. To find out how long it takes to develop an application for Android and iOS, you need to estimate the timing of the stages roughly.
To calculate the cost of telemedicine solution development, it is required to estimate what experts to involve and how much time each of them is to spend. So, the budget depends on the complexity of a project.
Clarification of the client’s request and rough estimations of resources needed is done during the initial phase of implementing a project, which is discovery, when we define requirements for the future solution, determine the solution plan, technical team composition, and product details. After it is done, we provide rough budget estimates so that a client can understand the lower and upper bounds of the cost.
Within the project implementation, a client gets a detailed report with the precise cost of work done on a monthly basis.
Anna VoznaClient Success Manager, Glorium Technologies
The final cost depends on many factors: the complexity of the functionality, the scale of the project, the technology stack, and the developer’s location. You don’t want to fall for the low prices – picking the right vendor right away will help you avoid double work and keep costs low.
If you are looking for a reliable provider to make your telemedicine app, choose one with experience in the field, familiar with the specific requirements and technical aspects of developing a telemedicine app. This includes understanding the various regulations and standards that must be followed and the security protocols necessary to protect patient data.
Glorium Technologies is well-versed in the latest trends and technologies related to telemedicine – contact us today and find out how to build an app that will help you get ahead of the competition.
Telemedicine app development costs may include:
Core feature set: Developing essential features like video consultations, appointment scheduling, electronic health record (EHR) integration, and secure messaging forms the foundation of the app. The complexity and customization of these features can impact development costs.
Compliance and security: It ensures compliance with healthcare regulations (HIPAA and etc.) and implements robust security measures to protect patient data are critical aspects that may incur additional expenses.
User experience (UX) design: Crafting an intuitive and user-friendly interface enhances patient engagement and satisfaction. Costs associated with UX design depend on the level of customization and complexity desired.
Platform compatibility: Building the app for multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, and web requires additional development efforts and may increase costs accordingly.
Integration with existing systems: Integrating the telemedicine app with existing healthcare systems, such as EMRs or practice management software, may involve additional expenses for customization and interoperability testing.
Maintenance and support: Ongoing maintenance, updates, and technical support services are essential for ensuring the smooth functioning and longevity of the telemedicine app. Budgeting for these recurring costs is crucial for long-term success.
Overall, while telemedicine app development cost may vary depending on the specific requirements and scope of the project, investing in quality development and compliance measures is essential for creating a reliable and effective healthcare solution.
Our Expertise
Telemedicine apps are reshaping healthcare delivery, and dentistry is at the forefront of this transformation. These advancements are crucial for enhancing patient care and streamlining dental practices.
Our latest case was a teledentistry solution with custom oral camera integration. MouthWatch, a pioneer in dental technology, developed an impressive teledentistry platform featuring a specialized intraoral camera for remote diagnostics. However, integrating this camera with a modern software platform presented a significant hurdle.
Glorium Technologies devised a comprehensive platform that facilitated appointment scheduling through its interface and enabled smooth integration with other scheduling systems. The platform could support large-scale web conferences, accommodating up to 2,000 participants. This feature underscored Glorium Technologies’ capability to deliver large-scale healthcare communication needs solutions.
Adhering to HIPAA standards, Glorium Technologies ensured the platform was secure and scalable. This consideration was crucial for maintaining patient data privacy and meeting the evolving demands of healthcare providers.
As the demand for high-quality telemedicine applications and telehealth platforms surges, Glorium Technologies stands at the forefront, enabling healthcare providers to connect with patients and offer remote healthcare services efficiently.
Summary
In conclusion, the telemedicine app development and telehealth applications stand at the forefront of revolutionizing healthcare delivery, offering unprecedented levels of accessibility, convenience, and efficiency. As technology continually advances and regulatory frameworks adapt, the area for innovation in telemedicine app development remains vast and promising.
To excel in the competitive telemedicine app development market, it is good to be well-informed about new technologies, prioritize robust security and privacy protocols, and adeptly navigate the complex regulatory environment.
If you deliver healthcare services, you may need user confidence through transparent practices, and exploring diverse monetization strategies, telemedicine apps hold the potential to profoundly impact the healthcare sector.
Especially when it concerns telemedicine app development, it is important to partner with a highly reputable company, who has a proven track record in healthcare technology. With the right team and our dedication to quality and compliance standards, your telemedicine app possesses the power to enhance healthcare accessibility and elevate patient outcomes on a global scale. Contact us and let`s redefine the future of healthcare.
