With people getting so used to the online shopping culture, almost all businesses are already online. Now, apart from brands selling products, slowly service industries have also started occupying the online world.
Yes, right from banking, fitness classes, and salons, almost all services are available online these days. So, why not medical services? In fact, the telemedicine industry is already widening the healthcare landscape, offering various healthcare services online.
Especially after the Covid-19 pandemic had a hard hit on our lives, remote healthcare has gained a drastic response from people worldwide. Thus, telemedicine apps are on boom now as it allows people to manage their illness by connecting with their respective doctors online right from their homes.
What is a Telemedicine App?
Telemedicine apps enable doctors to connect with patients online. Thus, patients can get doctor’s advice and receive treatment for their illness without visiting the doctor physically. With today’s technology, remote health checkup is made possible through phone calls, video chats, emails, text messages, and whatnot?
Firstly, patients and doctors need to get registered on a telemedicine app. Upon registration, patients can surf for doctors on the app and get a consultation from them. This telemedicine app comes in handy, enabling patients to reach doctors and manage their illness right from their homes.
During the pandemic, when everyone was at home to contain the spread of the virus, these apps allowed patients to manage their chronic health conditions like blood pressure, diabetes and lead a healthy life. Yes, after the Covid-19 pandemic, the usage of telemedicine apps has risen drastically.
How do Telemedicine Apps Work?
As we already saw, telemedicine apps enable doctors to treat patients remotely. Telemedicine apps are widely in use in two ways:
Patient Portals:
Patients can interact with healthcare providers through patient portals like asking queries, scheduling appointments, and getting prescriptions. These portals store the medical records of the patients like lab tests, x-rays, and other reports securely.
Virtual Appointments:
The usage of these telemedicine apps is skyrocketing these days. As the name says, patients can book virtual appointments and receive teleconsultation from doctors remotely. Patients and doctors can speak through phone or video conference for better diagnosis. Thus, the patients can get advice from doctors and manage their illnesses and health issues without stepping out of their houses.
Why build a Telemedicine App?
Now that we know about the telemedicine app, what benefits do they offer? How do doctors and patients benefit from these apps?
- Ease of Availability:
Some rural or remote places may not have access to doctor’s clinics or needed expertise in their cities. A telemedicine app removes the location constraints by enabling doctors to extend their medical services to all regardless of their locations. Thus, these apps help offer healthcare services to all, allowing people to manage their health issues, save lives, and helping people lead healthy lives.
- Reduced Healthcare Costs:
Telemedicine apps create a win-win situation for both doctors and patients. These apps remove the need for the physical clinic, eliminating the operational costs for doctors while facilitating reduced healthcare costs for patients. For instance, patients need not travel to the doctor’s place, avoiding unnecessary travel visits and indirect operational costs.
- Optimal Healthcare Services:
Even in a physical clinic, extended care generally ends when the patient walks out of the clinic. But, with a telemedicine app, medical practitioners can overcome this challenge by constantly checking and monitoring the patient’s progress. Hence, these apps allow doctors to provide excellent healthcare services while patients are mindful of their health.
- Better Communication with Patients:
Connecting with patients and checking their medical status goes easy with telemedicine apps. Yes, healthcare providers can
- Check with their patients
- Ascertain that they are taking appropriate medicines
- Monitor the status and progress of their health conditions and suggest follow-ups.
Moreover, healthcare providers can get telemedicine apps customized to their specialty as per their budget and needs. Thus, doctors can opt either for an extensive remote monitoring system or get an app with basic voice and video consultations.
Prime Features of Patient App:
- Registration:
Patients can sign up instantly with their mobile number, email, or social media handle for quick login. However, it is safe to implement double authentication that requires SMS, voice, or phone verification as the app will have personal healthcare records of patients.
- Patient Profile:
Patients can create their profile by including information like their name, age, gender, past medical history, and more.
- Search Option:
Patients can search for doctors using filters like specializations, location, fees, ratings, and more. Having filter options to sort for doctors by fees like low to high or high to low can come in handy for many patients.
- View Doctor’s Profile:
Patients can check doctor’s profiles and see their details like photos, medical expertise, address, fees, contact details, and available appointment slots.
- Appointment Booking:
Patients can book appointments according to the availability of doctor’s slots. You can customize the appointment booking feature as per your needs, like priority appointment booking for emergency care and a normal appointment booking for chronic care.
- Mode of Communication:
Patients can communicate with the doctors through audio calls, video calls, chat, or messaging. In case the need persists, the option for an in-person consultation can also be made available.
- Maintain Medical History:
Patients can upload their medical reports, prescriptions, and lab tests and maintain their medical history for future reference.
- Online Payment:
The app must have a secured online payment gateway that accepts multiple payments like cards, net banking, and more.
- Review Options:
Patients can leave reviews and give ratings to doctors. That will help other patients to choose the most suitable doctor for their needs.
- Insurance for Patients:
If you are determined and want to make the most out of the telemedicine app, you can go for this advanced feature, in-app insurance.
- Push Notifications:
Telemedicine apps can send push notifications to patients regarding upcoming appointments, offers, deals, and discounts.
Prime Features of Doctor App:
- Instant Login:
Doctors can quickly sign up and login into the app through mail or their phone numbers.
- Schedule Appointments:
Doctors can make a schedule by selecting dates, days, start and end times, and the appointment duration. They can actively manage their calendars with the telemedicine app easily.
- Set Status:
Doctors can set their availability status in the telemedicine app.
- Supervise and Manage Appointments:
The app facilitates the doctors to view the appointment requests, accept or reject appointment requests and view the upcoming appointments.
- Mode of Communication:
The doctor can schedule various types of consultation through the app like video, audio, and in-person for their patients. The doctors can also have an option to take emergency appointments immediately.
- View Patient’s Profile:
Doctors can view patient’s profiles, check the reason for visits, view past appointment histories and other details like appointment date, time, fees, and the status of the appointment.
- ePrescription:
Doctors can send prescriptions online to their patients. The prescription is saved in the app’s database for record purposes.
- Push Notifications:
Doctors can receive push notifications of their schedules, upcoming appointments with patients, payment status, and more.
- Edit/Manage Profiles:
Doctors can manage their profiles by including their professional details, uploading pictures, and updating fees.
- Dashboard and Analytics:
Doctors can view their dashboard and check for the number of patients, patient histories, prescriptions, earnings, and more. Of course, doctors can personalize their dashboard according to their requirements.
Cost of Telemedicine App Development:
The cost of telemedicine app development depends on various factors like:
- Front end development
- Backend development
- iOS app, Android app or both
- Web development
- Project management and
- Quality Assurance
Apart from the above-said aspects, the cost depends on the locality of the app development company. For instance, in western countries, the hourly rate of developers will be higher than that of Asian countries. Hence, the cost may vary from $ 20 per hour to $150 per hour. So, on average, the cost of a telemedicine app may go from $25000 to $70000.
How to Monetize Telemedicine Apps?
Here are a few monetization models of Telemedicine apps:
- Pay per consultation model- Doctors can charge consultation fees according to their specialty, expertise, and services.
- Membership/Subscription Model- Doctors can offer medical services for their regular/ chronic patients upon monthly payment.
- Franchising - Doctors can monetize by distributing their brands as a franchise.
- Software as a Service - Doctors can provide apps in the form of service to medical establishments.
Final Thoughts:
With mobile apps ruling every other business sector, the medical field has no exception in 2022. Telemedicine apps are quite popular among people as they come as a handy solution to manage their health problems. Also, people from remote places where there is no access to certain medical services can benefit significantly from these telemedicine apps.
Moreover, doctors can also benefit from it by rendering medical services online. Yes, they can cut operational costs, reach more patients and make consistent income.
The telemedicine app has already gained momentum among people, as it provides handy solutions to their problems. So, yes, it is the right time to invest in telemedicine app development.
All you need is to partner with the right mobile app development company that has extensive experience in telemedicine app development services. Cypherox Technologies is a leading mobile app and website development company that has rendered various telemedicine apps for healthcare industries worldwide. Connect with us to take your telemedicine app development further.
