In our modern world we would like to do all our tasks with just a mobile phone. Learn how to help people make an appointment with a doctor, receive a consultation, get a receipt, and even pay for such a service with a single tap.
The idea of digital health start-up gets an enormous surge as the world now is in the lockdown phase. Coronavirus around the world make people to be in quarantine mode and refrain themselves from stepping out of their houses.
But just imagine: an awful stomach ache. But besides COVID-19 quarantine its Friday evening. What to do in such a situation? Get along with the pain for the rest of the weekend? This is what may happen in a world without doctor-on-demand platforms.
Telemedicine applications can help you can schedule an appointment with a doctor, receive a consultation, get a receipt, and even pay for such a service. So it’s a win-win technology. The market size of telemedicine apps is expected to reach 40 billion dollars by 2021, according to a report from Statista.
So it’s high time to learn more about telemedicine app development and start your own project. If you want to develop a doctor-on-demand mobile app, this article is right for you. We’ll tell you the main benefits of telemedicine apps, talk about the best telemedicine solutions, and find out the main features for such an app.Â
But first, let’s discover why there is a need for telehealth apps.Â
Why there is a need for doctor-on-demand app development
As we’ve said before, telemedicine helps to overcome the bridge between a patient and a doctor. The reason why telemedicine apps are so popular is that they offer advantages for both patients and doctors. This solves the chicken and egg problem.
Benefits of the telemedicine apps for patients:
Convenience. A patient doesn’t need to lose time for making appointments in advance, the road to a clinic, and waiting in a long line. 74 percent of patients prefer easy access to healthcare services over in-person interactions with providers. In villages this number is even higher because there’s lack of specialists in rural areas.
Start their treatment faster. Patients also can start treatment straight away, right after the video call ends. This reduces treatment time and provides faster results.
Unified patient management and monitoring system. Telemedicine app development solutions can help with follow up consultations, updates to prescriptions, chronic disease monitoring, and so on.
Benefits of the telemedicine apps for doctors:
Efficient time management of healthcare specialists
Healthcare providers can organize doctors’ workload more effectively. So there is a possibility to examine more patients correctly. As well, the Doctor on Demand research states that around 15% of doctors experience burnouts and depression. Heavy working days of 60 – 80 hours per week is one of the reasons. Telemedicine solutions can allow for a better life-work balance for doctors.
Medical record keeping
Telemedicine apps allow specialists access and store medical data effectively. These days, it can otherwise be very difficult to access these records and transmit them to other doctors for better treatment prescriptions.
Facilitation of administrative operations
With the help of healthcare applications, more time can be devoted to the actual tasks. No more different forms and internal documentation, as most of the paperwork can be automated. Cutting out this inefficiency directly correlates with higher profits and results in treatment.
How does a doctor on-demand mobile app work?
Each telemedicine app has similar working process. The usual doctor-on-demand apps goes like this:Â
To take a consultation from a doctor, a patient logs-in to the system creates an account and describes their symptoms.Â
Depending on the user’s health condition, the app searches for the most suitable medical specialist nearby.
After finding a doctor, a patient can schedule a video call via the app using a built-in calendar.
During the video consultation, a doctor communicates with the patient, asks about health conditions, recommends treatment, assigns lab tests, and so on.Â
When the video consultation ends, the patient pays for healthcare service using a built-in payment gateway and receives receipts with prescribed meds and doctor’s recommendations.Â
Costs and Resources Required to Build a Telemedicine App
Here’s an approximate estimation of the cost to develop an app like Doctor on Demand for iOS and Android:
Business analysis – 105h
Project management – 260h
UX design – 450h
Quality assurance – 640h
UI design – 680h
Frontend development – 2380h
Backend development – 930h
The total duration of this project is around 5,445 hours. To find out the cost of the development, we need to multiply the duration by the hourly rate of a software development company. Here are the average hourly rates of development companies in different regions.
Choosing Central and Western Europe countries, be ready to pay around $234,135 for a telemedicine app like Doctor on Demand. In Belarus, a similar app will cost you approximately $136,125 for only one app (iOS or Android).Â
The timeline for this development varies from approximately 3 to 5 months.
If you want to add more functionality into your telemedicine app, it’ll be more expensive. The telemedicine app cost can go even beyond $250,000 if you want to create a feature-rich solution.
The telemedicine concept can work with healthcare providers, governmental healthcare institutions, patients, healthcare specialists, healthcare organizations, and so on.
Also a telemedicine project can focus on a specific healthcare treatment or client demographic (e.g. children, elderly people, etc.).
The flow to start with in telemedicine app development is as follows:
Define the exact target audience
Identify the purpose of the app
Develop a business plan for the project (incl. revenue streams)
Create reliable app content and organize the data
Plan the budget for telemedicine app development and marketing expenses
Apply for investments
Design and implement a product with a team of professional software developers
How telemedicine apps make money
Let’s analyze Doctor on Demand app. It doesn’t have a subscription fee. It doesn’t offer any premium accounts either. All features are available from the start. So how does it make money? The app charges a 25 percent fee to patients each time they pay for a consultation. The cost for a visit depends on the duration and on the specialist:
Medical doctor: $75 for a 15-minute consultation
Psychologist: $79 for a 25-minute consultation, $119 for a 50-minute consultation
Psychiatrist: $229 for a 45-minute initial consultation, $99 for a 15-minute follow-up visit
However, a transaction fee isn’t the only way Doctor on Demand makes money. It also provides its software as a service, offering its software to other medical establishments. Doctor on Demand charges these SaaS customers a per-provider fee. Companies that use Doctor on Demand software pay for each employee every month. This fee is about $1 per person per month, so if a company has 100,000 employees, it would cost about $1.2 million every year.
Here are some other approaches to monetizing your telemedicine app:
Annual membership for patients. The Arizona Telemedicine Program uses this monetization strategy. Its customers pay an annual fee and a charge for every service they receive.
Monthly fee for doctors and patients. This approach requires both patients and doctors to pay a fee every month to use the software. Myca Nutrition uses this approach and also franchises its system to other countries.
Franchising. If your local market is overcrowded, why not go to another market? This is exactly what SkyHealth did. SkyHealth is a nongovernmental organization based in the United States. The company offers its franchise to health organizations for only $3,000.
A per-minute charge. In this case, a patient pays for every minute of a consultation with a specialist. The Tele Doctoral program, owned by the Norwegian Telenor Group, charges $US0.08 per minute for a phone consultation with a doctor.
Get ready to telemedicine app development
To start the development process of your doctor-on-demand mobile app you need to shape your business idea with a monetization strategy, think about the app design and app layout, as well as HIPAA-compliant solutions to use.  Â
You definitely need a reliable development partner to provide the proper quality for telemedicine app development to meet your business and technical plans.
Our team has gained good expertise in healthcare app development. We have worked on a few complex projects following industry quality standards and mobile innovation technologies.
If you are looking for a reliable vendor, be sure that due to our experience in the domain, you can easily entrust us with your healthcare app idea.
Feel free to contact us and get an estimation of your project.
