Telemedicine is the type of healthcare services, which can be provided distantly by means of innovative web or mobile solutions both in hospitals and at homes. It brings healthcare extremely closer to the patients, who can be treated at distance. Let’s know Telemedicine App Development – How to develop it?

Telemedicine is an older term, focused on the clinical application while telehealth is concerned with a broader and more consumer-facing approach. North America has the largest telemedicine market globally. It is expected that the global telehealth market will grow to $35 billion by 2025. The telehealth market includes a variety of products and applications, however, the largest part of the telemedicine market in the U.S. is hardware.

Types of Telemedicine:

Three main types of telemedicine exist. All of these have a beneficial function to play in general health care and can provide tangible benefits for both healthcare staff and patients when used properly.

1. Store & Forward Telemedicine:-

Store-and-forward telemedicine, also known as asynchronous telemedicine, uses data collection tools, patient records, photographs, reports, and any other data that would be useful to healthcare providers. Text messaging is a shop-and-forward example. It’s not unlike email, but to maintain patient confidentiality, it is achieved using a solution that has built-in, advanced security features.

Store-and-forward telemedicine is an effective way to communicate with patients, primary care professionals, and specialists so they can all review the data when it is convenient for them. The method provides patients with access to a care team that can consist of professionals at various places, often over long distances and in different time zones. The main benefits of telemedicine include Convenience and access to care, Patient satisfaction, Speed, Maximize practice efficiency etc.

2 Remote Monitoring

Remote monitoring is also known as self-monitoring or self-testing, which uses a variety of electronic technologies to remotely monitor the health and clinical signs of a patient. This is commonly used in chronic disease treatment, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes mellitus, and asthma. Cost-effectiveness, more frequent monitoring, and better patient satisfaction are the benefits of remote monitoring.

3 Real-Time Interactive Services

Real-time telemedicine (also referred to as live telemedicine) makes it easy to see the doctor anytime, anywhere. Live telemedicine covers any two-way contact that enables clinicians and patients to connect in real-time (including video conferencing and telephone consultations). Medical history assessments, simple visual exams, psychological evaluations, and even ophthalmic tests can all be performed via telemedicine in real-time.

How to Develop a Telemedicine App

Step 1: Evaluate Your Idea:-

Before starting telemedicine app development you should be clear in your mind about why you want to develop this app. This is necessary to build a valuable application that will meet demand. Below are some steps to successfully evaluate your idea.

Conduct Business Analysis: This stage will help you to define your target audience. Business analysis will help you to identify your audience has problems and how your app can solve those problems. You may develop your application for clinics, dermatologists, physicians, psychologists, etc.

Also Read: Telemedicine Challenges during App Development

Research the Market and Your Competitors: In this stage identify the telemedicine market leaders and potential competitors. Conduct an in-depth study of their strengths and weaknesses, ratings, and user reviews. Adopt their strengths and learn from their weaknesses. Pay close attention to their prices, platforms.

Define a Unique Value Proposition: Every business has its USP and those who don’t have doesn’t survive for a longer time. This is why your telemedicine app must offer unique features to have an edge over your competitors.

Step 2: Consult a Telemedicine Service Provider:-

The next step you need to do is to find a Healthcare IT Solutions Company that can build your telemedicine application. There are millions of telemedicine app development companies in the world. The question is which one you would choose. For this, you should conduct research for various mobile app developers and compare them on the basis of price and expertise. You have to search for different websites to discover the development companies. After this step, you need to fill out the contact form or mobile project cost calculator and tell us as many details about your telemedicine software as possible to the mobile app development company.

This stage can continue from one week to a month depending upon the complication you need in the application.

Step 3: Create the Project Scope for a Telemedicine Platform:-

Get in touch with the application and software developers and brief them about what you want and the aim of your telemedicine app. The company’s business analyst and project manager will demonstrate to you a list of app features, create the project mock-ups, and prototypes. They will show you the basic design of the application you are looking for. They will also help you in developing features according to the market and customer expectations of a telemedicine app.

You can discuss with them regarding budget and timeline requirements for the development of the telemedicine app.

Step 4: Enter the Development Stage:-

After agreeing and coordinating with the mobile application developers, the team will start working on telemedicine app development. The teams will break down the app features into minor user stories that are easier to implement. Next, they will start developing the code, test it, and conduct bug-fixing.

In this stage, it is important to understand what are the various technologies used in Telemedicine App Development. Let’s see what these technologies are:

Artificial Intelligence: The use of AI in the Healthcare IT industry is increasing at a tremendous rate. Developers use AI in various ways like voice recognition, using language processing, machine learning, and chat boxes to provide a personalized experience to users.

Big Data: We know that information is generated and proсessed in great quantity in healthcare. With the use of big data computations, we can collect and analyze EHRs (electronic healthcare records). The information generated will help in improving quality care, come up with more accurate diagnoses, run medical researches, and eventually cut costs.

Blockchain: They help in avoiding the loss of any healthcare data that are stored in soft copy format. Blockchain renders the possibility to collect and transfer medical data securely.

IoT: With the Internet of Things, you can track data, provide diagnosis and treatment, feedback, medication adherence, real-time treatment, and more numerous benefits. This will benefit us in providing better patient care with the telemedicine app development solution. There are many telemedicine equipment available like smartwatches, tablets, digital cameras, medical kiosks, etc.

Step 5: Approve the App’s Demo:-

When the app is ready from hired Healthcare It company’s side, the team will show you the demo. If you are satisfied with the demo then the application is ready for launch, but if you still want some improvements then you can ask the development team to do it. This step will continue until you are satisfied with the application.

At this stage, there should be transparent two-way communication between developers and clients, so that there is no room left for miscommunication and dissatisfaction.

Step 6: Launch Your Telemedicine Application:-

When all the app features are properly tested and implemented, we ride the final product demo and give your app the project-related data, including databases, right to use to app stores, mock-ups, and designs. Finally, your Telemedicine app, with all the features is an available marketplace to serve the target audience.

Launching a telemedicine app is not the end, it is just the beginning. Below are some of the steps you can take after launching your application:

• Once your app is launched, don’t forget to collect user feedback. Analyze those feedbacks and work on negative feedback, if you have any.

• Also, focus on adding new features that the users feel missing.

• Try to add new features within a month to maintain the interest of the users, so do not move to some other app.

• Follow the same procedure to add more features for making the application more efficient.

All these steps will guarantee great efficiency while developing a telehealth application.

How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Telemedicine App?

The cost of telemedicine app development consists of various factors, which are given below:

• Technology needed

• Complexity of features

• Number of features

• Design and its complexity

• Development team hourly rate

The number and price of third-party applications (e.g. Google Maps) you can use in your app

You can expect to pay about $60,000-$ 100,000 on the first working version for one platform (iOS, Android, or Web) while working with an offshore software development company.

If you want to add more features or building a telemedicine app of greater complexity while creating a telemedicine app, be ready to invest more money. If you want to work on a very complex and feature-rich solution, the telemedicine app cost can even go beyond $240,000 per platform.