Yes, there is. Having a doctor appointment app as a part of the smart hospital solutions used in your clinic may give you a cutting-edge advantage at times of increased pressure on the healthcare sector. Below are the benefits you may get by offering a doctor appointment app as a part of the treatment experience in your hospital, the list of the essential features to create plus some insights into the development price specifics.
What Are the Benefits of Having a Doctor Appointment App
Still, doubt the need for a doctor’s appointment application? Here are the benefits you may get by integrating this solution into your medical practices.
Time Savings
As a rule, patients spend a lot of time calling the hospital and asking to schedule a consultation. Hospital’s customer service spends a lot of time too. Visiting a doctor without a pre-appointment implies the opportunity to queue for several hours. A doctor’s appointment application saves all these problems at once.
Cost Optimization
A doctor appointment application allows you to significantly reduce the downtimes of your doctors. According to the research, 26% of online scheduled appointments are for this or the next day, while 34,3% of all online appointments happen in non-working hours. Thus, the opportunity to schedule a consultation online allows patients to fill in the empty slots in the doctor’s daily plan, and in this case, the risk of a no-show is much lower.
More Accessible Healthcare
For the patients from remote areas where access to high-quality medical services is complicated, the opportunity to have a doctor consultation online may be a life-saving chance. However, this approach will work only in those areas where there is a stable internet connection and the population has enough advanced mobile phones to use applications.
Target Audience Perfect Match
Millennials and Gen Z are the categories of patients that are used to solving all their questions online. With the help of your doctor’s appointment app, you may offer them the interaction experience they want to have. To fully meet their demands, it will be great to have an in-built consultation cost calculator and payment gateway.
Main Features of a Doctor Appointment Application
However, to fully satisfy the demands of your target audience, your medical booking application should have the following essential features. What’s more, researching your target audiences’ preferences always makes sense to come up with something truly innovative but really useful for your patients.
- Registration. This is the basic feature for doctors and patients to land on the app.
- Doctor’s profile. The doctor profile should be created as a two-sided module, where the main information about a doctor, his specialization, and free time should be visible to patients, while the doctor may manage his profile, add data about himself. approve/cancel/suggest appointments.
- Patient’s profile. In this section, the patient should get access to his medical history, lab tests, prescriptions. scheduled consultations, paid and unpaid bills, and so on.
- Online booking. This is the core feature that allows for scheduling a meeting with a chosen doctor.
- Search for a doctor (local search). With the help of this feature, the patients should be able to look for a doctor with the hospital they are comfortable to visit.
- Video conference. This is an additional feature for remote consultations.
- Admin panel. Admin panel should contain customized dashboards for doctors and hospital management, reporting, accounting, and data analysis features.
- Reminders and notifications. These are necessary to let the patient stay updated, remind them of the scheduled consultations and notify doctors as well.
- Symptom checkers and online diagnosis features. These are advanced features that are powered by artificial intelligence, however, they greatly facilitate the work of a doctor and save his time on the initial health examination and diagnostics.
- Billing and payments. Also, it would be convenient to have billing and payment features in your doctor appointment app. Firstly, it allows patients to pay for the services right in the app; secondly, these features can be integrated with your accounting system.
The Cost to Create a Doctor Appointment App and Development Specifics
As usual, the cost to develop a doctor appointment app is quite specific. It depends on the features you want to implement, the complexity of your design, the number of integrations, and the location of your vendor.
- For example, the average cost to develop a simplified solution with an online booking feature, local search for the doctors, and reminders is $50,000. The development process takes up to 1500 working hours.
- If you want to add the function for video conferencing to the basic functionality, then the price may reach $100,000 (2600 development hours).
- The price to create a full-fledged doctor appointment solution with large data storage capabilities will be $300,000 which equals 80000 working hours.
Also, there is some doctor appointment app development specifics you should take into account as well.
Usability Issues
When creating an app for your hospital, make sure there are no usability issues. Firstly, the modern generation loves smooth online interaction wherever possible. Secondly, there are a lot of people with health anxiety and even the slightest discomfort makes them. In this case, your app should become a quick way out of the situation so that worried patients can quickly schedule a consultation with the necessary doctor.
Medical Information Protection
Also, your application should be HIPAA compliant. According to this regulation, health and medical data processed by your app should be safely protected with the necessary technologies. If there will be billing and payment features, you also need to follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard which defines 12 data safety practices you should comply with.
Conclusion
Creating a doctor’s appointment application for your medical practices is one more step towards providing a really innovative experience for your patients while cutting your costs and saving time for your doctors. What’s more, this is quite an affordable solution that can be created shortly by medical software developers.
