Table of Contents
Healthcare customers now expect faster and more convenient healthcare services. They expect healthcare to be more accessible for them, no matter what.
For healthcare businesses like yours, it is quickly becoming a necessity—not a luxury. But it is a challenge that needs your immediate attention.
The answer to the challenge is simple: healthcare software development.
And, if you think healthcare software development is all about delivering fast and convenient healthcare to your patients. You are wrong. It is also vital for your brand to stay ahead of the curve in your industry.
But you need to approach it strategically. That’s what we are discussing in this blog post.
This guide will help you understand:
Let’s start.
According to a report by Grand View Research, the global healthcare IT market is valued at USD 760.2 billion in 2024. It is expected to generate a revenue of USD 1,834.3 billion by 2030.
Here are a few more interesting statistics on the global healthcare IT and software development market.
Revenue from online medical consultation is expected to reach a whopping USD 36 billion by 2028, up from USD 21 billion in 2022 (Statista).
In its report, Rock Health states that nearly 80% of its respondents have used telemedicine once in their lifetime (Rock Health).
When it comes to healthcare, 74% of millennials prefer to have teleconsultations instead of in-person medical consultations (Global Med).
More than 55% of people believe they get better care through teleconsultations than via in-person consultations (McKinsey).
The worth of big data in healthcare management is expected to reach USD 105.73 billion by 2031 (Edge Delta).
Healthcare software development involves creating, designing, and maintaining applications or software solutions for the healthcare industry. The objectives of such solutions range from improving healthcare delivery to enhancing facility operations, accurate medical diagnosis, patient data management, and improving healthcare services productivity.
Healthcare providers and facilities can create a robust ecosystem using these innovative and efficient software solutions. Which will improve the overall healthcare service delivery and management.
It helps healthcare providers and enhances patient experiences while ensuring better treatments.
A healthcare facility may require different solutions to manage its operations efficiently. This necessitates creating apps tailored to meet the provider’s specific needs.
Owing to these diverse needs, healthcare software development can be classified into the following categories based on the type of app.
The EHR software helps you maintain and manage your patient data in the form of electronic records. You can also integrate the EHR software into your ERP and CRM platforms. It helps you avoid cumbersome paper records and access the data whenever needed. An efficient EHR management system lets you analyze the data and generate insights for better healthcare services.
Health professionals can send prescriptions directly to the pharmacy using e-prescribing software. The benefits of such a system are limitless. You can reduce waiting times, prescribe medicines currently in stock, and ensure faster medicine delivery.
A healthcare facility needs to be managed well. It may require different software solutions to manage the facility, billing, insurance services, administration, etc. With the suite of hospital management software, comprehensive hospital management becomes more efficient and productive.
With healthcare CRM software, you can manage the most crucial part of your service ecosystem—the patients. The system allows you to ensure better client relations by providing better healthcare, accurate service delivery, contract management, and more.
Telemedicine software allows doctors and other healthcare professionals to deliver consultations and support to patients using technology. It allows medical practitioners, such as doctors, psychiatrists, therapists, etc., to offer remote medical examinations and diagnostic assistance to patients. The system uses file-sharing and video conferencing tools to facilitate consultation.
Laboratory information management is an integral part of healthcare service delivery. The software allows quick and accurate results by streamlining laboratory activities and samples. This enables doctors and other professionals to deliver healthcare services and treatments faster and more efficiently.
Like a laboratory, radiology plays a huge role in healthcare diagnosis. The department can ensure better overall patient care by streamlining imaging, appointments, reporting, and invoicing with digital solutions.
With pharmacy management systems, healthcare providers can accurately manage pharmacy operations, medicine delivery, and medical stock. The system also has features to communicate with patients, track stock data, manage expired medicines, back up customer data, and more. It helps improve the overall efficiency and productivity of pharmacy operations.
Health information exchange solutions enable faster communication between healthcare professionals and other medical institutions. This communication helps ensure quick disease diagnosis, healthcare service, and patient treatments. These systems also use highly secured channels for interactions to provide top-notch data security.
A healthcare service provider needs to track and manage its billing activities. Billing and revenue cycle management apps allow you to do this comprehensively. They help you ensure accurate billing to the patients, while patients can get all the details they need about the care and treatments they receive.
Patient monitoring software allows you to monitor patients and their vitals for various healthcare purposes. The software gathers patients’ vitals in a healthcare facility or at home. This software solution also integrates with the facility’s hospital management or CRM system.
Medical networking software helps a medical professional or facility create strong connections with others in the industry. It enables them to work together on numerous aspects of the industry. Healthcare professionals can interact with each other and build a community to help patients better.
Developing a software solution can significantly help healthcare service providers, medical professionals, and patients.
Here are some of the crucial benefits of healthcare software.
When building a software solution for healthcare, you must take care of diverse elements.
Here are a few things to keep in mind.
This is the first thing you must do before starting anything related to the solution. Define who will use the software or platform.
Doing this allows you to understand:
The answers will paint a comprehensive picture of what they need and how you can build the best piece of software to help them.
Regulatory compliances for the healthcare industry have become stricter. It will continue to become even more so in the future. As a service provider, you need to recognize the importance of these requirements and why they are designed in the first place.
You must build technologies that can comply with these regulations. It not only helps you serve your patients better but also safeguards yourself.
When building a healthcare software solution, the primary objective must be to make it easy to use.
Often, doctors and healthcare professionals are the primary users of the app. They must be able to use the software easily without any ambiguity. Design the app with the users in mind and make it easy to use.
Apps that are difficult to use can make healthcare delivery and treatments harder or more complex.
Consumers have become increasingly technology-dependent now. And you can play into this trend for better patient satisfaction. Develop mobile apps to constantly engage with your patients during and after the treatment.
Make your services available to them using mobile phones and wearable technologies. When the treatment is ongoing, you can share the results and updates on time with the patients using apps.
After the treatment, it allows you to track their health and offer them remote support.
Analyze data for growth opportunities.
Building healthcare platforms and software solutions helps you collect patient and administrative data. This data provides great opportunities for your growth.
Analyze the data to identify areas for improvement in your services. Learn about patient care trends and where you need to work.
Such proactive analysis helps you understand opportunities for growth and serve your patrons better.
Scalability is vital for a healthcare facility. Ultimately, you expect the facility to grow, and the technology must be able to accommodate that growth.
Your operations may go haywire if you don’t play for this growth. Create apps and solutions with scalability and flexibility in mind.
Leave enough room to expand the capabilities of the solution and add adjacent features. This proactiveness will serve you better in the future.
When developing healthcare software and apps for your business, keep interoperability in mind.
Interoperability means that your software needs to work with other tools, platforms, APIs, and departments. As you grow and newer technology becomes available, your existing systems need diverse integrations.
Plan for these changes early in the development to avoid being stuck or incurring considerable costs to revamp your entire IT ecosystem.
At the end of the day, healthcare software systems and solutions are for better patient experience. The solutions must enable you to serve your patients better and conveniently. Everything else is secondary.
Custom Healthcare App Development for Medical Professionals
Developing custom healthcare software involves creating an app that meets the unique needs of a healthcare service provider or professional. A custom solution is crucial for businesses as it helps them meet their exact digital goals and requirements.
Businesses may have a few custom service requirements when developing customer healthcare software solutions.
Here are a few of them.
Developing a healthcare software solution takes a lot of planning and strategy. It helps you address the challenges early on and create contingencies to avoid them.
The process also lets you steer clear of any bottlenecks that might come across you.
The first stage of a healthcare software development project is choosing the target audience. Decide who you want to help. This helps you understand the target audience’s pain points and build solutions accordingly.
In this stage, you define the problem you want to solve for the target audience. This allows you to design the software around that core problem. At this stage, you also design the right features and capabilities for the app.
After you have finalized your idea, build a team. If you have in-house talent, constitute a team with the right skill sets. Otherwise, hire an agency to help you. You may also pick an offshore healthcare software development agency to make your project cost-effective.
Here, a scalable design for the app is created. Conduct extensive research in the industry and competitors to come up with an intuitive and seamless design. Also, focus on user experience and ease of use when designing the software.
This is the actual stage of development. Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) allows you to build a basic version of the software. Use the app to gather feedback from users and understand how it performs. Then, integrate the feedback to create the final version.
This is where you test the app before it is launched. If you are developing the software in-house, you may need to hire a software testing company. Or your agency can help you with the same. That’s what Fullestop does when creating any software.
In the last stage, the app is launched for the end users. The process is not over at this stage. The app’s performance and usage offer unique insights into its strengths. Therefore, monitor the app and its performance closely to improve it. Add new features, capabilities, integrations, etc.
The cost of developing a healthcare software solution can vary depending on numerous elements, which can drive the price up or down. Discovering these factors before you start the project helps you manage the overall cost.
While there are several elements like these, we will discuss the most crucial factors here.
When building your healthcare software solution, you often need to hire a software development agency. The cost can vary depending on the type of engagement with the agency.
These agencies also offer different types of engagement. You can pick from options like hourly, project-wise, or in-house support.
The cost of development can vary based on these factors.
The size and expertise of the software development team can also affect the cost of the project.
A team of highly experienced and expert developers requires significant investment to maintain. This top talent requires investment to retain. Of course, their skills are integral to your project.
Another factor that can affect is the skill set of the people. If you need specific skill sets, it might cost you more.
Developing a huge site with numerous features, integrations, and capabilities can increase the costs.
Complex and feature-rich software takes a lot of time to develop. It needs to be planned, designed, and developed well. Each of these stages can take time, adding up the costs.
Diverse integrations and unique UI/UX elements of the app also affect the cost of the project.
This is quite obvious. The more time a project takes, the more expensive it becomes. You must maintain the team and take care of the infrastructure as long as the project runs.
These factors can make the project costlier than you may expect.
The technologies and tech stack used in the project can also affect its overall cost, especially if AI is involved.
Collecting, preprocessing, and cleaning data for training can be very expensive. Integrating third-party apps like payment gateways can also increase the cost.
If you need to subscribe to SaaS products, it can also become an added cost element.
Here is a table with the approximate project development cost of software solutions in the healthcare industry.
| Sl. No | Type of Healthcare Software | Approximate Development Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medical networking apps | USD 25,000 to USD 75,000 |
| 2 | Healthcare billing apps | USD 45,000 to USD 85,000 |
| 3 | Wellness apps | USD 50,000 to USD 150,000 |
| 4 | Fitness apps | USD 60,000 to USD 300,000 |
| 5 | E-prescription | USD 40,000 to USD 75,000 |
| 6 | Telemedicine apps | USD 85,000 to USD 200,000 |
| 7 | Health monitoring apps | USD 75,000 to USD 100,000+ |
When developing a healthcare software solution, there are certain features you must have
Let’s discuss these must-have features here.
Digital transformation in the healthcare industry is quite different. Given the nature of the services and the people served, the transformation must be done with great care.
For this, you need to address a few crucial challenges. Let’s discuss the most common challenges in healthcare transformation.
Using healthcare software means collecting and storing many medical documents and records. This data must be stored in high-security facilities and systems, which can be expensive and complex. This can be a challenge for most healthcare institutions.
Creating a custom software solution for healthcare businesses is just half the job. You also need to integrate it into your existing IT infrastructure, which might be a challenge if not planned for from the beginning.
Using IT solutions to collect, store, and manage patient data must be done in line with the existing statutory regulations. Failing to do this may lead to legal concerns and compliance issues.
Not all healthcare institutions need the same technology or solutions to operate. Hence, creating custom solutions that meet these singular needs is challenging. It will also cost you more than using a ready-made healthcare app.
While the core expectation of using healthcare solutions is to serve patients better, the app’s user experience also needs to be taken care of. The software solution must be easy to use and be intuitive. Creating such apps takes time, effort, and design thinking right from the beginning.
From our experience creating healthcare solutions for medical facilities and professionals, we believe that the industry is just getting started. As new and powerful technologies like AI and ML become mainstream, it will continue to grow.
Here are a few areas where AI and ML will have a huge impact on healthcare software in the future.
One of the biggest challenges that the healthcare industry now faces is medical diagnosis and treatment planning. Accurate diagnosis is crucial to plan the right kind of treatment for the patient.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning software solutions can effectively address this. AI’s analytical capabilities, integrated with its visualization potential, can improve medical diagnosis.
Combine this with personalized medical care; you have a solid plan to ensure faster, effective treatment plans.
Finding new drugs is another challenge that the industry faces as a whole. With AI in the mix, this becomes faster and more efficient.
AI can use machine learning algorithms and systems to create simulations to find new drugs. It can also speed up the process of finding the right drug candidate by sifting through millions of chemicals.
In addition, AI can also help optimize drug testing processes, as it can predict who will likely respond more positively to a new drug. This reduces the extent of physical testing.
Chatbots and virtual assistants can help both doctors and patients. Doctors can use AI-powered virtual assistants to support them during diagnosis, patient interactions, and treatment.
Likewise, patients can use chatbots to find answers to their questions regarding their conditions, medications, etc.
In both these scenarios, it helps improve the overall treatment and patient experience.
AI and ML can also improve clinical trials and analysis. They can analyze patient data from different EHR systems to find the most suitable candidates for clinical trials.
Using AI, pharmaceutical companies can also design clinical trial procedures and predict outcomes for better trial results.
AI can detect inconsistencies, missing data, or errors in datasets. This reduces inaccuracies that could affect trial outcomes.
There are several trends in the medical software development field. These trends are transforming how these software solutions are designed and used to help healthcare businesses serve their customers better. These new technologies also help them improve their business operations.
Here are some of the top trends that you need to include in your healthcare software to make it work for you now and in the future.
Big data allows healthcare institutions to manage huge amounts of medical data and healthcare records. It is already becoming a vital part of digital healthcare as healthcare facilities need to analyze the data to make treatment decisions.
As per Root Analysis, the role of big data is only getting bigger, thanks to the applications of AI and machine learning in the healthcare industry.
AI is another technology trend that’s becoming popular with every healthcare software. The possibilities of using AI in healthcare software solutions are numerous.
Artificial intelligence helps healthcare providers analyze huge amounts of data, improve operational efficiency, automate workflow, etc.
By 2030, AI in healthcare is expected to be worth about USD 187.95 billion worldwide.
The Internet of Medical Things, or IoMT, is another trend gaining momentum in the healthcare industry. It enables medical technologies, systems, and infrastructure to be connected and work together via networks.
The applications of IoMT are numerous, as it creates a connected healthcare environment. Healthcare professionals can collect patient details and plan treatments based on them. The steady growth of IoMT in the healthcare industry across the world is a testimonial to this.
The IoMT also makes disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and doctor collaboration faster and more efficient.
Remote monitoring is another growing trend in the digital healthcare industry. This is more convenient for patients than anything else. Healthcare institutes can monitor their patients and their vitals no matter where they are—at work, traveling, on vacation, etc.
These unique benefits of remote patient monitoring in the healthcare industry have helped it become a common feature in most healthcare software.
Medical professionals also benefit from this trend as they can monitor their patients from anywhere in the world.
Augmented and Virtual Reality are also becoming trending technologies in the digital healthcare sector. These technologies allow healthcare institutes and professionals to offer advanced diagnosis, remote treatments, etc.
The flexibility and ease of use of these technologies have supported the constant growth of AR and VR in healthcare over the last few years.
As AI and ML become more prevalent in the field, combining them with AR and VR technologies can greatly improve patient experiences.
Chatbots have been in the healthcare industry for years now. Most websites have used them to connect with their users and provide answers to their questions. It needed a human person on the other side. However, with generative AI in the picture, chatbots have changed the game.
They help healthcare professionals and facilities use pre-trained AI features for healthcare diagnosis and creating personalized treatment plans. This has enabled the rapid growth of chatbots in the healthcare industry.
Chatbots will continue to evolve using AI and machine learning technologies to become an even more integral part of digital healthcare service delivery and patient experiences.
Creating a healthcare software solution is a lengthy and complex process. It requires adequate planning and strategy. Even then, the chances of things going out of hand can be high. With this guide, we hope that you have a clearer idea of how to develop a healthcare software solution the right way. When you plan to build your healthcare software application, ensure you follow the insights we have shared here. One of the best things to avoid all these issues is to hire an experienced software development company to work with you.
Fullestop has worked with numerous businesses and healthcare professionals to create healthcare apps for them. Our custom service offerings have always met their requirements no matter what. Having a team of experienced developers, application strategists, and healthcare experts, we can bring all your software app ideas alive.
