Imagine that you came home on Friday evening and you are suffering from a terrible headache. What would you do? Will you suffer from the pain till Monday? This situation is quite possible in the world without telehealth apps. Nowadays, due to technological progress, you can make an appointment with a physician, receive a consultation, pay for such a service, and even get a receipt.
If you consider creating a telemedicine application, this article is what you need. Keep up to know more about telemedicine development, its trends, advantages, features, and price.
What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is the remote delivery of healthcare services, including exams and consultations, over the telecommunications infrastructure. The very first time this term was used in 1900 in Australia. That time a doctor used a two-way radio powered by a bicycle treadle to transmit a medical advertisement. Since that time technology has gone ahead. Nowadays, nobody uses the radio. Instead of that, today, healthcare providers have telemedicine websites and mobile apps.
Initially, telemedicine was used to help patients that didn’t have access to traditional hospitals — mostly people living far from the cities or towns. After some time the technology that was used in case of necessity has become a convenience, allowing telemedicine to develop as an industry. According to Global Market Insights, in 2019, the telemedicine market was worth $45 billion and it was expected to grow almost 20% by 2026. The COVID-19 pandemic might have raised that number significantly.
Telehealth Market: Trends and Insights
The recent job postings show that there is a huge demand for telemedicine service specialists, especially psychiatrists, neurologists, dermatologists, allergists, pediatricians, immunologists, family doctors, etc.
Telemedicine implementation is so widespread that hospitals either actively invest in their adoption within their inpatient facilities or plan to do so in the next 18 months.
Particularly, the development of mobile telemedicine applications, which are setting trends in the creation of new ways of communication between doctor and patient, is showing steady growth with an expected growth rate of 35% over the next few years.
Sophisticated functionality neatly packaged into a simple mobile interface design to provide the best possible customer experience has allowed applications such as Doctor On Demand, LiveHealth, MDLive, Lemonaid, HealthTap to take the leadership position in telemedicine services.
How to Develop a Telemedicine App Step-by-Step
A telemedicine app development requires good timing, right planning, and execution. Listed below stages will explain how to create an application without missing anything.
1. Assess a Business Idea
To build a useful application that will match future users’ expectations, the developers should understand all the project nuances. Because of it, you have to be ready to answer all the questions. Business idea assessment requires business analysis; the market and competitors’ research; a unique value proposition defining; creating a prototype; conducting testing, and getting feedback; marketing channels research.
2. Choose a Platform
Before starting to code you need to determine the platform that fits your business the best. It might be iOS and Android for mobile, web, and native for desktop. The desired features and target audience will direct your choice.
3. Create a Design
The design is the first thing people notice. That’s why the design phase is the most crucial in the whole mobile app development process. You need to strive to make the application as simple to use as possible. So, take care that all information is pretty understandable to users, and navigation is easy and intuitive. Different colors and button sizes have to be tested. User behavior is affected by colors and the position of elements on a screen.
4. Choose APIs for App Integration
Creating a telemedicine application without APIs can last from one to two years. But available components make the process faster and easier. There are plenty of them. We list the most widespread ones:
- VSee SDK is a telemedicine API with its own server-client. So, you don’t need to provision a server to set it up.
- Vidyo allows you to integrate real-time communication capabilities into your app on multiple platforms.
- WebRTC is a free and open-source platform that enables real-time communication in web and native apps.
- OpenTok allows you to integrate video, voice, text messaging, and screen sharing into your app on the web, iOS, Android, and Windows. It doesn’t support macOS.
5. MVP Development
At this stage, the magic starts to happen and your plans come into reality. The developers start to code and integrate desired technologies into the application.
6. Testing the Telemedicine Application
After the development has finished you need to fix all the bugs and make sure if the application works seamlessly.
7. Launch of the Application
When all desired features are implemented and bugs fixed, it’s time to launch the application. However, this is not the end of the development. And in some cases, it is just the beginning. The best approach to make your application a big success is following the Lean Startup Methodology. It aims at the approach of build, measure, and learn.
This article was originally published: https://code-care.com/blog/telemedicine-application-development/
