Table of Content:
- The Rise in Demand for Doctor Appointment Booking Apps
- Recent Fundings list in the Field of Doctor Appointment App Development
- Top Players of the Doctor Appointment App Category
- Key Features to Include in your Medical App For Doctors Appointment
- How to make your app for doctors appointment future ready?
- How to Generate Money on Your Doctor Appointment App?
- The Cost to Develop a Doctor Appointment App Like ZocDoc
The evolution track that the mobilized healthcare economy has placed the industry on has not just made health care more accessible and real-time but has also achieved the complication of bridging the gap between the patients and doctors.
One of the biggest contributory digitized factors behind this movement that has made healthcare more hassle-free and accessible than ever before is App for Doctor Appointment.
The way digital healthcare IT solutions industry is moving has now made it possible to handle functionalities like bookings, cancellations, re-booking, follow-ups, and reminders online, crossing all the fuss linked with manual appointment schedule systems.
The ease that online appointment booking apps offer has brought in an unprecedented demand for the healthcare category from all the different stakeholders of the healthcare domain, thus making it an important part of the healthcare mobile apps trends and one of the most followed upon healthcare app ideas.
The Rise in Demand for Doctor Appointment Booking Apps
The ease – of booking and monitoring – that the doctor appointment application offer has made them a prime category in the Healthcare & fitness mobile app development domain.
Here’s a short infographic to validate the demand from numbers, statistics that prove how your hospital need a mobile application for scheduling appointments –
The interest that the doctor appointment booking apps have garnered have led to heightened demand from the investor side of the healthcare IT solutions industry.There are a number of funding rounds that have happened in the field of a doctor appointment booking application. Let us look at some of the recent funding rounds in the area –
Recent Fundings list in the Field of Doctor Appointment App Development
- HotDoc, in September 2018 raised $5 Million at the back of its active doctor appointment users who belong to million users count. The active investor, AirTree invested in the brand to support expansion into services like telehealth services and several payment functionalities within the application.
- Solv, the same day health appointment app, in May 2018, raised $16.8 Million to expand beyond appointment booking space and give users the facility to pay their medical bills through the application itself. The investment round lead by the Slavet’s firm Greylock with an active participation from the Aspect Ventures has brought the total funding to over $21 Million.
Apart from these, a number of other apps like Kry and Any Time Doctor have also bagged high investments at the back of their plans to bridge the gap between the healthcare app for patients and doctors by making healthcare more accessible.
With the constant attention and heightened acceptance from all the stakeholders of the healthcare economy and the investors, there are a few doctor appointment booking apps that have established themselves as them as the market leaders.
Top Players of the Doctor Appointment App Category
While Practo and ZocDoc are the two doctor appointment booking apps that are ruling the healthcare app category, there are a number of other apps that are performing equally well in the industry.
There are a number of factors that have contributed to making these apps the best in doctor appointment class. But the one prevailing factor present in them all is the set of Features that are present in all the applications.
The features that have now become a must-have lot for healthcare brands seeking constant growth and demand from all the involved stakeholders.
Let us look at what those features are.
Key Features to Include in your Medical App For Doctors Appointment
Stakeholders’ Profiles
Building the Doctor and User Profile are the two primary parts of the Doctor on appointment specific healthcare app development. While the user profile will be drawn around the users’ name, age, gender, and basic medical data like height, weight, blood group, hereditary disease, etc. The doctor’s profile will have details like their area of specialization, the location of their clinic, the timings, names of hospitals they are associated with, and the visitation charges. What we would advise is to treat the user’s profile page as their personal health chart and the doctor’s profile page as a section where everything – their specialization, degree, their photo, clinic’s photos etc. is present.
Doctor and Clinic Search
The next must-have feature in the list is the Search option. Your patients’ side of the user group should be given an option to search for doctors and clinics on the basis of different parameters like the specialization, the clinic’s or doctor’s name, the wait time, visitation charges, etc. Opt for having a wide search filter menu for offering the best services to the users.
Geo-Location Based Search
Another addition in the list of MVP(Minimal Viable Product) features would be adding a geo-location based functionality to enable patients to look for doctors and clinics in their area of residence or work. You can make use of Google’s and Apple Map functionality to add in the location-based search feature in your doctor appointment booking mobile application.
The benefit of this would be that the usability factor of your healthcare app would increase by manifold and with it the session time of your medical app for doctors appointment.
Appointment Booking
The feature, as it goes without saying, is one of the most basic features of your app to find doctors. The appointment booking feature that you are adding should belong to a very simple interface, where the whole process of finding a doctor and confirming a time slab for booking the appointment is very easy and hassle-free.
You should give the patients the option to select a future date according to their availability while giving the doctors the functionality to accept or reject the appointment in real time as per their availability.
Doctor Review
Doctors’ rating and review is the one feature that will make the patient side of the users’ get engaged to your mobile app for finding doctors. For your healthcare app, you will have to ensure that you have a good lot of genuine rating and reviews for your partnered doctors.
The case with doctor appointment apps is that the patients only click on those doctors’ profile who have a good set of rating and reviews backing them. So, in case they find profiles with no ratings and reviews, chances are that they won’t interact with those doctors and ultimately with the app as a whole.
Apart from giving the patients side of the users the option to give ratings and reviews, you should also give the option to add media to enable them to add the condition of the clinic for other patients to view.
While these are the features that will form a part of the must-have or MVP features, there are a number of other features that can be added as apart of your application on a future date, once the MVP has proved of your app’s viability.
- Telemedicine
- Patient Check-In from the App
- At home Medical Service
- In-Built Payment
- Reminder for Appointments
Now that you have looked into all the features that contribute into the making of a successful mobile app for finding doctors, it is time to look into the technologies that can be incorporated to give you a competitive edge among the hundreds of doctor appointment online apps mushrooming in the market.
How to make your app for doctors appointment future ready?
There are three technologies that can make your doctor appointment app more efficient and future-centric –
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Doctor appointment booking apps like ZocDoc is using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to a huge extent for making search more relevant.
What happens is that the general users don’t know the specialization names like Ophthalmologist or Oncologist but what they understand is Eye doctor or Cancer specialist or at times they make queries in more layman terms like doctors for blurred vision, etc.
In the case like this, when you integrate Machine learning in your app, you are able to match the patients to the right doctor with much ease.
Cloud Computing
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As your medical app to find doctors starts expanding, you will start dealing with petabytes sized data, which you’ll then have to store, demarcate the data into categorized silos, and then transform the data into insights that would then be used to deliver better services.
The cloud computing industry has grown to a huge extent especially for the Healthcare industry stakeholders. With Google Healthcare Cloud API getting ready to hit the Beta stage, the Cloud computing industry is going to bring a number of advanced level benefits for your doctor on appointment app – Big Data, Machine Learning, and Heightened Security powered by Google’s own IAM system.
Blockchain
While the impact of Blockchain on the Healthcare ecosystem has proved itself to be more than a fallacy, the doctor appointment domain will not be sans the touch of decentralization too. The technology can have several adoptions in the popular healthcare app category.
Blockchain will help bring all the data in one decentralized system which will only be accessible by those who have the access to it, thus eliminating the instance of data or appointment detail leak. Also, the patients, from within your side of healthcare app for patients will be able to check their insurance claim details before booking a doctor’s appointment – something that will help them connect with only those doctors or clinic that are a part of their insurance umbrella.
With this, we have now seen all – The market for doctor appointment online apps, the features set that will mark its success and the technologies that will make your mobile app for finding doctors truly nextgen. The time has now come to look into the different modes of revenue generation to see how you can earn money on the healthcare app that is poised to transform the healthcare domain. After all, if the cost of making an app like Practo or ZocDoc is X, the revenue that you should earn on it should be X+1.
How to Generate Money on Your Doctor Appointment App?
There are quite a few options that you have when drawing a revenue model for your doctor appointment booking app.
The ones that seem to work most in favor of the popular appointment booking apps like Practo, ZocDoc, and Doctor on Demand, amongst others, are:
- Subscription: You can give doctors and medical practitioners the option to take monthly or yearly subscriptions, which would give them access to x number of patients. Within your healthcare mobile application, you can either give them the option to contact an unlimited number of patients like what ZocDoc does or make a number of patients wise subscription model.You can also ask the patient side of your users to pay a monthly subscription amount for connecting with doctors on your platform.
- Sponsorship: You can give the doctors and healthcare organizations the option to show their names on the top of your healthcare mobile application as part of your Sponsored programme. In the sponsored section, you can offer them greater videos or photos count than the regular users.In our experience, users are more open to paying extra if they are getting higher visibility than the others on the platform.
- On-Demand Services: Although an advanced level revenue stream, you can attach a number of on-demand services through your doctor appointment booking mobile app. Services like at-home blood and urine collection, medicine delivery, etc. can be added to make your app an extended healthcare solution provider while finding yourself an additional source of revenue stream.
Now that we have looked at the features that would go into getting your doctor appointment booking app and the revenue streams through which you can earn money on your healthcare app, the time has come to look into How much does it cost to develop a doctor appointment app.
The Cost to Develop a Doctor Appointment App Like ZocDoc
If you plan on going with the MVP features that we mentioned before, for your doctor appointment app, the healthcare app developers might charge somewhere in the range of $40,000 to $50,000 but if you are looking to add more advanced features like video functionalities and Artificial Intelligence, it would grow up to $100,000 to $150,000 price range.
What we would recommend is that instead of investing money in the name of doctor appointment app development cost for making a highly advanced full-fledged doctor appointment booking app, start with an MVP, see how it is being accepted in the market and then expand to adding other healthcare app features. This would ensure that you are constantly adding some value to the users’ life instead of giving them everything up front and then being with the same set of medical app features forever.
While we are positive that you must have got all the answers that you are seeking for launching your doctor appointment app in the market and the cost to build a healthcare app, there are still a few questions that our clients ask answers of. Here’s what we tell them.
In case your question is not listed here, contact our team of Medical app developers to get a definite answer.
The FAQ on Doctor Appointment Booking App Development
1. Which platform to go with first
The answer to this would lie with your demographics. If your user group belongs to the western nations, go with iOS. If you are planning to expand your bases to all over the world, go with Android.
What we would recommend is investing in React Native powered Healthcare Mobile App Development and getting the app on both Android and iOS to make the most of both the platforms.
2. How will I manage doctor’s listing
As an app admin, you will be given a separate profile from where you will be able to add in the doctors’ listing along with their several other details. You will also be given the freedom to remove a doctor from the app or edit their information.
3. Should I develop a web app as well
While not at the beginning, it would help greatly to expand into the PWA domain, once you have steady traffic coming in. This would only take your app to a million other users at a very minimal price. All the while bringing down the cost to develop doctor appointment booking app.
4. How to add trust in the app
There are quite a few ways to make your app an element of trust.
- Get accredited and add badges of reputed healthcare standard bodies in the app
- Add multi-factor authentication system at all stages – Log in, Payment, Social Sharing etc.
- Aim at adding real photos, videos, and reviews of the doctors you associate with.
