App Ed Review
Mobile health applications or mHealth apps are becoming a trend nowadays. It’s not a surprise to finally see the health industry on the playing field with the continuous rise of mobile users’ web traffic shares.
Health app development is actually the process by which an application is built for mobile devices. Its main goal is usually to help users manage their insurance claims, hospital visits, medical conditions, and fitness goals. Health applications include prescription and appointment management, lab results reviews, telemedicine, and more.
If you’re thinking about developing a health app, here are essential things you need to learn to help you build one with the potential to succeed.
1. There Are Different Types Of mHealth Apps You Can Build
When building health apps, it’s easy for you to get lost while trying to figure out where your idea really fits into the bigger picture. With every item as exciting as the next, you must, therefore, decide first where your idea perfectly fits within the eHealth space.
Familiarize yourself with all the major types of health applications. To home in on exactly the type of application to start with, have a detailed look at them below.
- Health And Lifestyle Apps
Meditation or motivational and diet and fitness apps, like those that guide users on how to perform intermittent fasting, properly fall into this category. These applications often cater to users or a consumer market looking to accurately track their fitness or personal health. Health and lifestyle applications are typically personal in nature.
- Medical Resource And Education Applications
Apps that fall under this category include drug-related information pertaining to different studies, educational games, study guides, or clinical references.
- Telehealth And Remote Monitoring Applications
These are the ones that enable remote transmission of patient information to a healthcare provider in a different location.
- Scheduling And Reminder Apps
Applications that fall under this category help administrators and physicians quickly and efficiently schedule future appointments.
- Clinical Assistance Apps
These applications continually assist medical practitioners in offering in-office or in-hospital diagnoses. They offer electronic medical records and electronic health records access, including symptom checks, patient charts and laboratory results review, digital imaging abilities, and other types of assistance.
2. There’s A Specific Fitting Platform For Your Health App Idea
The choice of platforms and medical devices significantly influences the features you’re going to build into the health app. Your options include augmented reality, virtual reality, or internet of things integration. You can also opt for AI integration by Microsoft, IBM, or Google. Building an application that works specifically with smart speakers, smartwatches, tablets, or smartphones is another thing. Last, but not least, decide whether you want to focus on Android or iOS, or both.
You’re always welcome to think outside the box. A health game app is also something you can look into. Is there a place for it in the mHealth space? Yes! In fact, there’s plenty of them on Google Play already.
3. App Notification Designs Are Crucial
It’s important to give notifications a design that would make them unique or differentiate them from one another. It’s a way of indicating an urgency or notification importance. Notifications are crucial when it comes to mHealth apps. They’re especially important for applications that provide milestones, reminders, and tracking.
To highlight the urgency and avoid confusion, you’d have to give the reminders different design elements. For instance, the app you’re building offers reminders to users of their designated time for taking a pill, and it reminds them of upcoming doctor’s appointments at the same time. It’s where app notification designs really matter.
Incorporating a geo-location feature in your health app will also help provide powerful time-based notifications. Real-time notifications are beneficial in doctor’s appointments. For example, if the user is unaware of what exact location they have to go, your app can make use of the Global Positioning System to send notifications to users telling them that they have reached the spot.
4. Privacy And Compliance Research Is A Must
Unlike many other security and digital privacy concerns, health apps are actually subject to fierce legislation, all in the name of practitioner and patient protection. Indeed, privacy is the most important thing when developing such applications.
For patient protection, you’ll need to obtain necessary certifications through HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
To further protect the users of your mHealth app, you also have to take these extra steps below.
- Avoid protected health information (PHI) compromise by maintaining updates and preventing network infections.
- Encryption should be installed and enabled on mobile devices.
- Create a privacy policy that’s both informative and accessible.
- Add forms of user authentication, like user passwords.
- Weigh the pros and cons when it comes to security between Android and iOS.
Patient-users will be fully protected by implementing the steps above.
5. Service Integration
Service integration is one of the things that add value to your mHealth application while ensuring maximum effectiveness. It’s something that you need to focus on. Your app should integrate with emergency services and related mobile/web applications with no problem.
Conclusion
Taking the five things outlined in this post into consideration puts you in control of developing health apps that work for both healthcare providers and patients.
Channel the needs and wants of health consumers to producing an application that works amazingly for all.
