Healthcare Mobile App Development: Comprehensive How-to Guide

Nowadays, the healthcare industry is becoming more digitized at high speed. Every day, the market witnesses the emergence of more and more trends focused on healthcare app development.

According to Statista forecasts, in 2024, the revenue in the digital health market will reach $171.9 billion. The annual growth rate is projected to be 8.49% from 2024 to 2029, and by 2029, the market size is expected to be around $258.3 billion. The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is estimated to be $129.2.

Such demand is driven by the fact that mHealth solutions aren’t dependent on location & time so people can use such services wherever and whenever they want or need.

The same reason explains why you as a provider of Healthcare Products or Services might benefit from building a health app. You can reach a much wider audience and generate more revenue in less time since there’s no need to physically connect with your customers to provide services.

📌 In the same way, diet and nutrition app development can automate meal planning, grocery list creation, and dietary recommendations, making healthy eating more accessible and personalized for users.

# 2: Additional Functionality

It can happen that an existing health application doesn’t cover all of your potential cases.

Such a problem with limited app functionality is often relevant for businesses whose products are made with the help of different “out-of-the-box” mobile health and fitness app development services like Fliplet and Appy Pie that allow you to create a healthcare app by using a template.

Another reason why some businesses contact software development teams is that they want to add third-party integrations to an existing product. There are two main outcomes:

1. If the current product allows integration with needed APIs or BLE devices (like fitness bands, heart rate trackers, etc.), the development team can easily do this.
2. If the existing app can’t be modified with such integrations, your Technology Partner can suggest a solution to your case.

# 3: Workload Reduction

These days, booking an appointment with a physiotherapist can be quite challenging, often involving weeks of waiting. That’s why medical app development, such as physiotherapy app development, is critical to streamline processes and reduce doctors' workloads.

A mobile healthcare application development can help with workload reduction since many processes can be automated, and that reduces the workload on the medical staff.

Here are a few use cases demonstrating how such apps streamline processes like appointment scheduling, electronic prescriptions, and insurance claims while reducing workload:

• Instead of meeting patients in person to prescribe physiotherapeutic exercises, doctors can upload video instructions directly to the app or the user’s profile, saving time and effort.
• All prescriptions and recommendations, including electronic prescriptions, can be securely stored in the app, ensuring users can access the information anytime without needing to contact physicians.
• Apps can also simplify insurance claims by providing easy access to required documents and medical histories, making the process more efficient for both users and providers.

In terms of your profitability, digital healthcare app development can help you provide services to more clients in less time.

# 4: Constant Connection

From the medical point of view, it’s important to stay in touch with patients to have a more detailed overview of their well-being.

Mastering how to build a healthcare app is key, as it empowers doctors to detect and prevent diseases at their early stages, so patients don’t come for a visit only when the situation gets critical.

This can be achieved through remote patient monitoring, photo "reports" from patients, symptom checkers, and other digital tools that enhance the diagnostic process.

Step 3: Designing User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)

The focus should be on creating an intuitive UI and an effective UX design for both iOS and Android platforms. The UX should be simple yet functional, catering to the users' specific needs, while the UI should be engaging, offering a pleasant and easy-to-navigate experience.

Step 4: Ensuring Compliance and Security

When you develop a healthcare app, it’s essential to follow industry standards such as ISO 13485, ISO 27001, and ISO 27799, which focus on quality management, information security, and health data management, respectively.

Since healthcare applications handle sensitive personal health information, you should comply with HIPAA, GDPR, and PIPEDA regulations. Additionally, ensure robust data security measures, including data privacy, data encryption, secure user authentication, and privacy protection, to safeguard user information.

Step 5: Develop the App

In mobile healthcare application development, choosing the right technology stack is crucial for performance, scalability, and compatibility across platforms. Focus on building a robust frontend and backend that ensures smooth user experience and reliability and integration with existing health systems.

Step 6: Testing and Quality Assurance

Thoroughly evaluate the health tech app for functionality, usability, security, and compliance. This is an important step that involves identifying and resolving any bugs or issues before launching the application.

Step 7: Launching the App and Marketing

Build a healthcare app, test it, and deploy it on the relevant platforms. Use a powerful marketing strategy to highlight the app's unique features for the target market when promoting it.

Step 8: Feedback and Continuous Improvement

Gather user data, check its effectiveness, and review app performance after launch. Analyze this information and use it to make the necessary improvements and updates to ensure the app is still relevant and helpful.

Step 9: Support and Maintenance

Continue providing support to address any user challenges and constantly update the app to fix bugs, enhance features, and ensure compliance with new laws.

Step 10: Scaling and Adding Advanced Features

As your app grows, think about expanding it to cater to more users and integrating sophisticated features such as AI-derived analysis, wearable device integration, personalized health tips, and seamless connectivity with health systems.

📌 By incorporating health and wellness app development, you can further enhance your platform with lifestyle coaching, stress-relief programs, and personalized fitness recommendations.

We began with a Discovery phase, analyzing the legacy software and legacy systems and working with Caspar Health to align new features with user needs. Our team used React Native Paper to design a healthcare app that meets accessibility standards. We also integrated TalkJS to meet security requirements while maintaining Sendbird for certain clinics. The updated app includes a rehabilitation progress tracker, allowing users to monitor exercise plans and daily progress.

The updated app led to a 4.7-star rating on Google Play and over 500,000 active patient accounts. With over 10 successful releases, we continue to refine and improve the app’s functionality.

LifeBonus

LifeBonus is designed to ease the burden on caregivers by providing efficient tools for managing elderly care while promoting their well-being. As the elderly population grows in the EU, LifeBonus combines AI-driven exercise tracking, certified care advisor guidance, and stress-relief resources to improve caregiving efficiency.

LifeBonus needed a mobile app (for both iOS and Android smartphones) to streamline caregiver task management, improve their health, and ensure effective elderly care. To create a healthcare app, we used AWS Lambda for cloud scalability, Terraform for configuration management, and integrated Artificial Intelligence, namely Machine Learning Kit for exercise tracking. We also built an intuitive, accessible interface and implemented a flexible CMS for ongoing updates.

With a 4.8-star rating on the App Store and a 4.2-star rating on Google Play, LifeBonus demonstrates the power of digital transformation in healthcare. It continues to evolve, providing caregivers with the tools they need to improve their quality of life while offering excellent care.

MoveYoo

Another project we worked on is MoveYoo — a German physiotherapy app enabling therapists to remotely prescribe exercises to their patients.

We had to build a health app from scratch, incorporating features like well-being check-ups, therapeutic exercises, and personalized plans created by doctors.

WePulse

One of the other projects is WePulse — a corporate well-being platform that’s intended to encourage employees to live healthier lives. We started working with them when our other client Humanoo, a German corporate health platform, acquired WePulse.

Their team asked us to proceed with the backend development for the mobile app. For health & fitness user data exchange, we’ve integrated 3 fitness services:

• Runtastic;
• Suunto;
• Withings.

Now, they can get all necessary activity data without having to measure it on their own.

Humanoo Kids

The Humanoo Kids app was designed to help parents track their child's development, manage health-related events, and access expert advice on wellness and nutrition. The client approached us to learn how to develop a healthcare app featuring milestone tracking, vaccination management, and appointment scheduling, along with integration into Humanoo’s insurance services.

Over the project, we developed a React Native app with TypeScript, Firebase, and GraphQL, offering personalized content, video recording for custom achievements, and seamless insurance integration. The intuitive interface ensured ease of use for parents.

FitTracks

We can also show you how to build a healthcare app, using our experience with FitTracks as an example — a fitness app offering audio-guided workouts for everyone, from absolute beginners to seasoned athletes.

The workouts of this health mobile app fully meet all World Health Organization recommendations, and each one is designed to last 8 weeks with a possibility of a 4-week extension. FitTracks helps people adjust their workout routines for different muscle groups, prevention purposes, and joint workouts.

All courses have detailed video and audio instructions, as well as written texts so you can get yourself acquainted with the needed info before the workout and feel more confident about its structure.

Moreover, FitTrack’s workout programs are recognized by the German government as prevention courses. For users, it means that they can request 100% reimbursement from their health insurance companies.

Feel Amazing

Our team has worked with Feel Amazing, which is a project of Ailsa Frank, a British hypnotherapist and motivational keynote speaker. It’s targeted at general mental health improvement & self-development.

Their team’s main goal is to help people overcome their bad habits and be a better version of themselves through audio & video courses, as well as live streams.

The app has many courses dedicated to various topics — from alcohol and nicotine addictions to women’s well-being. It helps people to fight their fears, improve relationships with their loved ones, gain confidence, and adopt healthy habits.

It’s also child-friendly since the content includes sensitive topics regarding alcohol and smoking, which we secured with security measures, such as the Child Lock feature that hides content with age restrictions.

If you’d like to learn more about how to create a health app, check our case study:

The beauty of custom healthtech app development is that you can tailor it to your specific needs. If your idea is technically feasible (which we can help you determine), we’d be happy to assist!

However, healthcare apps might require additional details beyond the basics. For instance, users may need to provide specific health information when completing their medical profiles.

These profiles are often kept anonymous to comply with GDPR and HIPAA Security Rule requirements. Personal details are either stored securely within the app or managed by healthcare vendors and businesses without directly linking the information to an identifiable user. Incorporating essential features like two-factor authentication further enhances security and ensures sensitive data is protected.

# 2: Medical Profile

To create a medical app that provides personalized care and enhances patient management, you should include (or require, depending on its type) the option to fill out a detailed medical profile.

General information in the profile may include:

• Photo
• Sex
• Age
• Weight
• Height
• Insurance details (if you need it)

When building a health app, leveraging patient portals offers an excellent opportunity to collect and manage specific health details. Depending on the app's focus, the data requirements will vary. For example:

• A sleep-tracking app might display users' sleep schedules and ask targeted questions about their habits.
• A mental health app could inquire about disorders, anxiety levels, or emotional states.

📌 You can find out more about mental health app development in our guide!

For most healthcare apps, gathering details like chronic diseases, allergies, and medical history ensures the services are both safe and accurate, providing tailored support for users.

# 3: Chats with Doctors

Before we start talking about it, we’d like to point out that many types of healthcare apps don’t imply direct communication with doctors, making this feature irrelevant for those specific apps.

To enable patient-doctor communication and still reduce the doctors' workload, you can add chats, allowing patients to ask questions, and doctors can reply when they’re free, without being distracted from working with other patients. This is one of the key aspects of how to develop a healthcare app that balances convenience and efficiency.

It might be a great idea to place an emergency button for cases when patients can’t wait and need a consultation as soon as possible.

# 4: Push-Notifications

Many healthcare apps use push notifications to remind users about daily activities, such as taking medications or birth control pills, completing well-being or symptom check-ups, and more.

This feature is versatile and can serve various purposes, including marketing. For instance, if you have a special offer, like a discount for a premium account, notifications are an excellent tool to inform users about such events.

# 5: Payment Gateway

In case you offer any in-app purchases or the app itself isn’t free, you might need to create a health app with a secure, reliable & user-friendly payment gateway.

For a better user experience, the payment gateway should:

• Be consistent with different OS types.
• Use popular online payment methods like PayPal, Google & Apple Pay, a credit card, etc.
• Function fast with no delays.
• Provide strong protection of users’ data.

# 6: Customer Support

To help users figure out how to use certain features or deal with simple technical malfunctions, you can add user-oriented customer support.

When you make a healthcare app, a good customer support system typically includes:

• A chatbot that solves simple issues and escalates user requests to specialists.
• Live chat with support specialists.
• FAQ sections with a wide range of pre-answered questions.
• 24/7 phone support for emergencies.
• A list of contacts with mobile numbers for different operators, email addresses, and links to social media and messengers (like WhatsApp).

To ensure GDPR compliance when you develop a health app, you must meet six key requirements:

1. Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency.
2. Purpose limitation.
3. Data minimization.
4. Accuracy.
5. Storage limitation.
6. Integrity and confidentiality.

# 2: HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a US regulation that mandates healthcare institutions, businesses, and their associates to implement measures ensuring the security of patients' data at all stages — receiving, transferring, sharing, and handling it.

For how to create a health app that is HIPAA compliant, you'll need to adhere to specific rules on handling Protected Health Information (PHI), which include:

• Treatments.
• One’s past, present, or future mental/physical condition.
• Past, present, or future payment for healthcare received.

Additionally, a person’s identity must be verified using one or more of the 18 HIPAA-defined identifiers to ensure proper compliance with HIPAA privacy regulations.

# 3: PIPEDA

The Personal Information Protection And Electronic Documents Act is a Canadian privacy law that regulates the collection and use of personal data to protect individuals' privacy rights. PIPEDA covers a wide range of information, including names, ages, IP addresses, medical records, and employee files.

The principles of PIPEDA are similar to GDPR, emphasizing:

1. Accountability.
2. Purpose.
3. Consent.
4. Limitations.
5. Duration.
6. Accuracy.
7. Protection.
8. Transparency.
9. Access.
10. Challenge.

If you'd like to learn more about how to make your medical mobile app compliant with GDPR HIPAA, and PIPEDA regulations, be sure to check it out.

Here are some use cases of how mobile healthcare software can leverage BLE integrations with medical devices:

• Fitness Trackers: Monitor heart rate, physical activity, sleep patterns, and more.
• Remote Healthcare Monitoring Systems (RHMS): Enable healthcare apps to collaborate with doctors for remotely tracking general health, chronic conditions, and more.
• Inner Body Sensors: Small sensors inserted into the body to detect early signs of dangerous diseases and alert doctors in emergencies.

For example, when learning how to create a medical app, you can read how our developers worked on integrating data transactions from cadence and heart rate sensors into the Platoon Fit app.

If you’d like to learn more about integrating BLE devices with a healthcare app development company, check out our article: