How to Develop a Mobile Medical App: Comprehensive How-to Guide

Nowadays, the healthcare industry is becoming more digitized at high speed. Every day, the market sees the emergence of more and more mobile applications aimed at health care. According to Statista forecasts, in 2023, the revenue in the digital health market will reach $170.20 billion. The annual growth rate is projected to be 10.07% from 2023 to 2028, and by 2028, the market size is expected to be around $275.00 billion USD. The Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is estimated to be $57,770 per user.

China is expected to be the leading market in the global healthcare sector, contributing over $46 billion to the market in 2023.
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 exact same reason explains why you as a provider of HealthCare Products or Services might benefit from it. You can reach a much wider audience & generate more revenue in less time since there’s no need to physically connect with your customers to provide services.

Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced health and wellness services to become more digitized. It happened primarily because many people wanted to minimize the risk of getting infected & use as many services as they possibly could remotely. Thus, businesses had to adjust to these conditions.

Additionally, there won’t be any extra features that aren’t relevant to your app, thus, such an approach is more beneficial in the long run.

Another reason why some businesses contact development teams is that they want to add some 3rd-party integrations to an existing product. There are two main outcomes:

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

# 3: Workload Reduction

Nowadays, it’s quite challenging to make an appointment with a physiotherapist — the waiting can go on for weeks. This is why physiotherapy app development is critical to streamline processes and reduce doctors' workloads.

A healthcare mobile app can help with this as well since many processes can be automated, and that reduces the workload on the medical staff.

Here are a few use cases of how such apps lower the workload:

• Instead of having to physically meet patients to prescribe physiotherapeutic exercises, doctors can simply upload the video with instructions to the app or directly to a user’s profile.
• Many skin conditions can be monitored through the app. Thus, there’s no need for doctors to have a patient in their office for a check-up — the person can easily & safely upload a photo to the app.
• All prescriptions and recommendations can be securely stored in the app so if users need to freshen up the information, there’s no need to bother specialists anymore.

In terms of your profitability, it can help you provide services to more clients in less time.

# 4: Constant Connection

From the medical point of view, it’s highly important to regularly 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.

It can be done through photo “reports” from patients, various symptom checkers, etc.

For a better user experience, you can add a feature that’ll scan the QR-code on the medication & automatically add it to the list.

It can be done either by building it into the app or integrating it with the camera on users’ devices.

In addition, it might be a good idea to correlate components of a patient’s medications to make sure that they’re compatible with each other.

# 2: Activity Tracking

This feature can include various activity indicators:

• Distance traveled.
• Workout planners.
• Screen time for eye-related health issues.
• Some specific customizable indicators like swimming, cycling, jumping, etc.

So that the development would be easier and faster, you can integrate third-party services like Apple Health and Google Fit into your app to enable certain features, instead of developing custom ones. Also, you can use fitness bands, smartwatches, smart fitness equipment, and other BLE-devices.

This can allow you to track heart & breath rate, blood pressure — everything and anything that such devices & APIs provide. If you’d like to learn more about how to do so, here’s our article dedicated to this topic:

Also, our experts can help you build your own personal training app that stands out in the market.

# 3: Sleep Tracking

To help people improve their sleeping habits and inform them about different activities during sleep, you can add a feature to track such things.

After tracking sleeping activity, you can give advice on how to improve the current situation, offer some sleeping meditations, relaxing sounds, audio sleeping guides, etc.

To increase engagement, you can add a sleep recording feature since many people would like to know if they sleep talk to analyze the quality of their sleep or just for entertainment.

# 4: Exacerbation Control

It’s a good idea to add customizable questionnaires to capture the exacerbation phases & how users feel throughout them.

Moreover, healthcare spheres can be absolutely different — from mental health to skin conditions.

Take a look at some typical use cases of this feature so you can have a clearer picture of what we’re talking about. The exacerbation of:

• Bipolar disorder.
• Pain during oncological diseases.
• Skin conditions.
• Respiratory conditions.
• Allergies & others.

# 5: Symptom Check-Ups

To deeper understand the state of each user’s health, you can add various questionnaires on how people feel every day.

To begin with, you can add general questions like temperature, heart rate, blood pressure (if possible to measure), typical symptoms like headache and/or stomachache, dizziness & a bar to add notes that these questions don’t cover.

After that, you can offer to create custom questions to tailor the app to each user’s needs.

Additionally, you can offer them to generally track their daily activities so doctors can determine the possibility of certain symptoms being influenced by routines of patients.

# 6: Camera

This feature is intended to picture any external symptoms of illnesses. In addition, it is perfect for preventing & controlling purposes.

You should also leave a bar for notes so people can type in some additional symptoms that can’t be captured on camera like pain, itchiness, etc.

Furthermore, offer users to generally track their daily activities so doctors can determine the possibility of certain actions being influenced by routines of patients.

Here are some typical use cases for this feature:

• Regularly take photos of the body to monitor moles & help detect potentially dangerous changes on the skin at early stages.
• Monitor the course of diseases like pink eye.
• Track acne improvements or worsenings, etc.

Examples of Tracking Apps

Here, we’d like to show you some existing examples of such apps:

• For medication control and reminding: Medfox, Medisafe, Mango Health.
• Activity tracking: Strava, Runkeeper, Strong.
• Sleep tracking: Pillow, SleepScore, Sleep Cycle.
• Exacerbation control: Propeller Health (the app for asthma control){target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener"}, Cancer.Net. Mobile (cancer help & control), Nia.

App for Patients. Healthcare Assisting & Healthy Lifestyle

This type of medical apps is normally dedicated to treatments that aren’t pharmacotherapies.

They can include physiotherapies, dietary, comfort therapies, etc.

You might want to add the following features:

# 1: Exercises

This feature can help people who were prescribed physical exercise or just need some supporting treatments to deal with certain pains (i. e., knee pain).

So, without having to see patients in their offices, doctors can simply send them video instructions on how to perform certain physiotherapies.

You can also offer some premade universal exercises that surely won’t be harmful & will help with certain conditions.

It might be a good idea to provide a tracker where patients will give feedback on how they feel during & after exercising, rate the difficulty of it, and the level of pain.

In this way, doctors will be able to track the progress and tailor the prescription.

# 2: Nutrition Tracking

With this feature, doctors’ can send dietary prescriptions to their patients and they can always have access to it.

In addition, with an app, patients don’t have to bother doctors anymore if they need to double-check or recall any information.

Also, providing a list of recipes for different categories of patients, such as diabetics, people with different allergies, as well as people with different dietary preferences, might be a pretty good idea too.

Moreover, you can add low and high calorie recipes and many other categories to cover as many needs as possible.

In fact, we have an article dedicated to the topic of nutrition and diets if you’d like to check it out:

Examples of Healthcare Assisting Apps

Let’s take a look at some existing apps in this sphere:

• Physiotherapy: PhysiApp, MoveYoo — we’ve actually worked with MoveYoo.
• Nutrition: PlateJoy, MyNetDiary.

Healthcare Assisting: Our Expertise

We, at Stormotion, have developed both a mobile and a web app for FitTracks, a fitness app with audio-guided workouts for all categories of people — from absolute beginners to experienced athletes.

Their workouts fully meet all World Health Organization recommendations and each one of them is designed to last for 8 weeks with a possibility of a 4 week extension.

All courses have detailed video & 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.

In fact, 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.

Their app helps people adjust their workout routines for different muscle groups, prevention purposes, and joint workouts.

If you’d like to learn more about this project, there’s a case study on our website:

App for Patients. Mental Health

Mental health issues are something that’s easier to deal with remotely, making health and wellness app development a crucial aspect of addressing these concerns.

Furthermore, the diversity of such apps is quite impressive. Some of them help to deal with specific problems, from anxiety and panic attacks to OCD and bipolar disorder. Others are intended to improve general mental well-being, and some don’t specialize in any field, but rather offer a customizable experience to every user.

Let’s review what features such apps normally have.

# 1: Well-Being Check-Ups & Tracker

In mental health app development, incorporating features like well-being check-ups and trackers are essential to monitor patients’ mental health regularly, as mental issues are rarely a permanent state.

You can add questionnaires on general topics like current mood, concerns, psychosomatic symptoms like headache, stomachache, feeling of heaviness in the chest, etc.

Then, if a user requires such, you can provide specialized customizable questions that will be suitable for their disease. It might be a good idea to leave a bar for additional notes.

A tracker can be simply organized as a calendar with all dates where any notes or check-ups are taken. Normally, this information is accessible anytime.

# 2: Tools to Get Grounded

Many people often need to get grounded to simply understand what their genuine feelings are or to calm down the temporary acute phase of an issue.

“Grounding” with help of a medical app can be done by using these tools:

• Leading questions to pinpoint the true feeling.
• Memory games like looking at a picture for a short time and then trying to recall it in detail.
• Meditations & other tools.

# 3: Support Chats & Groups

When dealing with mental health issues it’s really important for patients to be understood, and with an app, it’s easy to provide such feelings.

You can create multiple chats & groups on Social Media so people with similar concerns and issues can feel united and comforted by each other to feel less stressed.

Additionally, it’s also a great idea to provide users with emergency mental health support from professionals, so people in need can get primary psychological assistance anytime.

# 4: Meditations

One of the most important parts of mental well-being is meditating. That’s why meditation mobile app development services might help offer your app users a wide variety of meditations.

Meditations can:

• Help to deal with anxiety and intrusive thoughts.
• Help with grounding.
• Be voice-guided or without any accompaniment.
• Improve sleep & others.

Examples of mental health apps

Here are some real-file mental healthcare app examples:

• OCD: nOCD, GG OCD Relief (has tools for dealing with anxiety and depression, but the highlight is OCD).
• Anxiety: Anxiety Release, Dare.
• General Mental Health: Talk Space, Be Mindful.
• Meditation: Calm, Headspace.

Mental Health: Our Expertise

Our team has worked with Feel amazing, which is a the project of Ailsa Frank, a British hypnotherapist and motivational keynote speaker. It is 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, mend relationships with their loved ones, and gain confidence.

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

So, if you want to create a mental health app feel free to reach out to us!

App for Patients. Women’s Health

Women have to deal with different health issues on a regular basis — from cramps and breast pains because of their physiology to menstrual disorders.

That’s why FemTech apps have already become a whole industry and help women take better control of the general health as well as of their well-being during pregnancy, period, etc.

Let’s take a look at what features can be used to create a women health app:

# 1: Period Tracker

This feature is one of the most used ones in such apps. It can include:

• Menstrual cycle tracking & prediction.
• Ovulation calculation.
• PMS symptoms tracking & others.

Moreover, by tracking different symptoms and pains before and during “that time of the month”, women can get a better overview of their general health.

This information can also help doctors understand each woman’s specificity to provide better services and lower the intensity of the symptoms.

# 2: Pregnancy Control

Regardless of the fact that pregnancy is an extremely tender process and requires constant doctor control, an app can still be helpful.

Such a feature can provide a bunch of useful tools:

• Daily well-being check-ups.
• Pregnancy journals for positive moments like baby’s first kick, ultrasound results, etc.
• Pregnancy journals for body changes & further medical care.
• Lists with recipes for pregnant women.
• Reviews of medications that aren’t allowed during pregnancy etc.

# 3: Birth Control Tracker

Hormonal birth control medications are usually very strong, so their taking has to be medically prescribed & strictly controlled to provide efficiency and minimize side effects.

With an app, it becomes much easier to control this process.

So, such a feature can have these tools:

• Birth control pill reminders.
• Side-effects checkers & a bar for notes.
• Customizable trackers for those who use other types of contraceptives like the contraceptive implants, IUDs & others.

Examples of Women's Health Apps

Let’s take a look at some existing solutions on the market:

• Period tracking: Flo, Clue, Glow.
• Pregnancy control: Ovia (has solutions for different women’s health spheres), Sprout, Baby2Body.
• Birth control tracking: myPill, Bedsider Reminders, Nurx.

App For Providers

Medical service providers, such as hospitals or clinics, require advanced diagnostic systems that reduce the number of misdiagnoses and treatment plans. Healthcare provider applications aim to simplify the patient intake process, coordinate staff work, and manage patient records.

Such applications may include features such as:

• Electronic Medical Records
• Electronic Health Records
• Hospital Information System (HIS)
• Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)
• Custom software solutions for managing medical staff
• Patient data analysis
• Hospital medicine inventory management
• Tracking hospital medical equipment and accessories
• Admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) systems

Examples of Providers Apps

VisualDx is a clinical decision support system widely used in dermatology and other medical fields.

PEPID is a comprehensive clinical decision support tool designed for healthcare professionals. It offers a vast database of drug information, medical calculators, and clinical content.

DrChrono is a comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) and practice management platform designed for healthcare providers.

Locus Clinician is an app designed to assist healthcare providers in managing their clinical workflows and patient care more effectively.

App For Doctors

This type of application is designed to benefit doctors, nurses, and other medical staff.

Doctor applications may have a range of functions, including:

• Patient diagnosis (it can unclude video and audio calls)
• Digital workspaces for doctors and nurses
• Care coordination applications
• Assistance in prescribing medications
• Medication management
• Management of medical images (X-rays, MRI, etc.)
• Laboratory management
• Viewing and analyzing medical images
• AR/VR for surgery planning and medical staff training

Examples of Doctors Apps

Lybrate is a versatile platform that connects patients with healthcare professionals.

Medscape is primarily known as a medical news and education platform. Healthcare professionals widely use Medscape for up-to-date medical information.

Appointment management/Telehealth

This type of healthcare apps is basically an app where people can schedule doctor appointments, access their prescriptions, and visit appointments.

We won’t get into detail here since we already have an article dedicated to developing telehealth apps. So if you’d like to learn more about this type of healthcare apps, feel free to follow the link:

To conclude the section, we’d like to point out that healthcare apps can be absolutely different, as they can consist of 2 or more types, partially have features that we’ve mentioned and/or also have something unique, etc.

The point of a custom healthcare mobile app is that you can customize it to your liking. So, if it’s possible to put your idea into practice from the technical point of view (which we can help you determine as well), we’d be more than happy to help you!

However, healthcare apps might need a little more than that. For instance, you might additionally ask for certain health details, but it can be required when users would complete their medical profiles.

Such profiles are often anonymous to meet all GDPR requirements. In this case, personal details either stay strictly inside the app or are stored by healthcare providers & other businesses without knowing to whom this information refers.

# 2: Medical Profile

To be fully aware of what to pay attention to when working with each patient, you should offer (or require, depending on the type of your app) to fill in a medical profile.

General information can include:

• Photo.
• Sex.
• Age.
• Weight.
• Height.
• Insurance (if they have one).

After that, you might need to ask for any special details about one’s health.

What’s important here is that each use case is unique, depending on the type of your app in the first place. For instance, if you work with sleep tracking, the medical profile would show the sleep schedule to users, while asking questions relevant to the issue.

In case you work with mental health issues the questions would be regarding any disorders, anxiety, etc.

Yet, in most cases, you might need to know certain details such as chronic diseases, allergies, medical history, etc., so the services you provide are safe and accurate.

# 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, which makes the feature irrelevant for them.

To enable patient-doctor communication and still reduce the doctors’ workload, you can add chats, so patients have the option to ask doctors questions, and doctors can reply when they’re free, without having to be distracted from working with other patients.

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 like taking medications or birth control pills, doing well-being/symptom check-ups, etc.

Basically, it’s a universal feature that can be used for a variety of purposes, marketing included.

If you have a special offer, like a discount for a premium account (if you have it), notifications are a great 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 a secure, reliable & user-friendly payment gateway.

For you to be GDPR compliant, you’ll need to fulfill 6 key requirements, which are:

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

We won’t get into details, however, we have a whole article dedicated to GDPR and two more laws (HIPAA, PIPEDA) that we talk about in the next subsections of this article if you’d like to learn more on how to make your medical mobile app compliant with these regulations:

# 2: HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is the US regulation that requires healthcare institutions, businesses & their associates to develop and follow methods that can ensure the security of patients’ data on each stage of working with it — receiving, transferring, sharing, and handling.

This regulation is more specific and imposes rules on handling PHI (protected health information) that you need to implement into your medical mobile app to be HIPAA compliant:

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

However, the identity of a person needs to be authenticated by one or more of 18 HIPAA-determined identifiers.

Again, we won’t fill you in on the details, but you can follow this link for an in-depth analysis of HIPAA compliance.

# 3: PIPEDA

Personal Information Protection And Electronic Documents Act is a Canadian privacy law that governs the use & collection of personal data in a way that complies with the people’s right for privacy.

This regulation covers quite a wide range of information from one’s name, age, and IP address to medical records, employee files, etc.

The principles of it are partly similar to the ones of GDPR:

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

For more details, you can click on this link.

Here are some use cases of how a mobile health app can leverage BLE integrations with devices:

• Integrate fitness trackers to check heart rate, physical & sleeping activity, etc.
• RHMS (Remote Healthcare Monitoring System) is used by healthcare apps to cooperate with doctors for remote monitoring general state of health, chronic diseases, etc.
• Inner body sensors. There are certain small sensors that are “inserted” in patients’ organisms to detect specific symptoms of dangerous diseases at early stages & have enough time to save them. Such sensors can be connected to an app and send signals to doctors if there’s an emergency.

We had the experience of working with integrating data transactions from cadence and heart rate sensors right into the Platoon Fit app.

If you’d like to learn more about integrating BLE devices into your healthcare application, you could read our article on this topic:

10 Steps to Develop a Successful Healthcare Mobile Application

If you are wondering how to develop a healthcare app, we have prepared a step-by-step plan for you. Where to start and what not to miss? Let's figure it out.

Step 1: Market Analysis and Understanding the Audience

Market research should be done before digital health app development starts. Learn about the industry trends in healthcare, recognize your competitors and assess them in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.
Also, make sure that your app will answer real questions and solve serious problems of your potential users.

Step 2: Defining the App Type and Features

Determine the kind of healthcare app you desire to invent whether meant for patients, healthcare providers, or all. Therefore, list the required elements of the app you create. These include appointment scheduling, telemedicine, medicine tracking, health data monitoring, and secure means of communication.

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

The focus is on making a user interface. UX should be simple but effective targeting the users’ individual specifications. UI in app design should be interesting to use creating pleasant user interface conditions.

Step 4: Ensuring Compliance and Security

Data handled by healthcare applications deals with personal health information, and thus it is important to adhere to healthcare legislations such as HIPAA in the US or GDPR in Europe. Ensure good enough security such as data encryption, secure user authenticity, and privacy protection.

Step 5: Develop the App

Select the best technology stack for your app, taking into account issues such as performance, scalability, and compatibility across platforms. Build the front-end and back-end of an app that will be compatible with the available health systems.

Step 6: Testing and Quality Assurance

Thoroughly evaluate the app concerning functionality, usability, security, and compliance. This is a significant step that involves checking and removing any bugs or problems before taking the application live.

Step 7: Launching the App and Marketing

Build a healthcare app, test it, and launch 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, analyze its effectiveness, and review app performance after launch. Review 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 keep compliant with new laws.

Step 10: Scaling and Adding Advanced Features

As your app grows, think of expanding it to cater to more users and incorporating sophisticated features such as AI-derived analysis, wearable device integration among others, and personalized health tips.