Why Should You Develop mHealth or Telemedicine App?

Primary Needs, Use Cases and Challenges Covered

Telemedicine is one of the best rollouts of digital advancements in the healthcare sector. The flexible healthcare and telemedicine solutions for patients and people suffering from chronic disease and challenged by traveling to visits, follow-ups, etc. are helping them save time and money by facilitating 24/7 on-demand access to Doctors and Physicians anytime, anywhere.

Pragmatically, "telemedicine apps" are creating a new avenue for patients to connect and collaborate. They are also serving as a huge opportunity to alleviate the burden of office visits and go beyond the clinical walls. For urgent care and primary care, virtual visits or remote care are improving the patient experience while still providing quality care.

What’s The Primary Need to Develop a Telemedicine App?

A. Let’s talk on the basis of statistics:

• A 2017 survey obtained by C2 solutions claimed that almost 75% of hospital visits, doctors, urgent care and emergency room visits in the US are very basic and can be easily handled via a phone or a video call.
• A Solution reach survey of patients last year showed that 73% of patients now want to text their doctor's offices and 79% would like to receive text messages from their doctors.
• Fifty-eight percent of baby boomers, who consume the largest portion of healthcare services in the country, are spending three times more for personal healthcare than the average working-age person, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. And their wish list that stands true for ideal doctor is:

B. On basis of functionalities

Use Cases/Functionalities of a Telemedicine App and Related Benefits

• Real Time Consultation Saves Time and Money

A healthcare or telemedicine app allows a patient to book an e-visit, where he needs to answer a questionnaire regarding the symptoms and then search through a list of doctors available who have a specialism in curing that disease. Then after selecting one, the patient can book an appointment and take a real-time consultation from the Doctor without any hassles of location and time and all this with full peace of mind.

This helps patients in saving an enormous amounts of travel time, waiting time and costs.

• Photo and Video Based Virtual Online Consultations

Photo-based store and forward consultations allow Doctors to treat a patient remotely by simply getting a small questionnaire filled and an image attached, which is thereafter analyzed by the Doctor and helps him in establishing a diagnosis and messaging the patient with a treatment plan. While video-based consultation allows doctors to schedule a real-time call with their patient and send the diagnosis via an app.

Telemedicine app development solutions by Codiant allow doctors and patients to make secured video calls while allowing them to transfer files or e-prescriptions in the ongoing call.

Benefits:

1. Limits travel for patients
2. Extends care to rural areas
3. Reduces healthcare costs
4. Minimize infrastructural requirements
5. Limits the volume of phone calls, text messages, and emails
6. Allows to view health reports in real-time

• Specialist Referral Services Allows Remote Patient Diagnosis

Specialist referral services typically involve a specialist assisting a general practitioner or healthcare physician in rendering a diagnosis. This may involve a patient seeing a specialist over a live, remote consult or the transmission of diagnostic images and/or video along with patient data to a specialist for viewing later.

This practice helps practitioners in receiving remote help on an efficient and timely basis and gives an enhanced ability to provide more comprehensive care while breaking the geographical barriers.

Related: Integration Of Wearable Technologies Into Patients’ Electronic Medical Records EMR

• Improved Patient Safety Through E-Prescriptions

A custom telemedicine app allows you to transmit eRX (e-prescription) to a pharmacy that helps in reducing manual errors and misinterpretations while improving patient safety. Further e-prescribing increases prescription legibility, decreases the time required to prescribe medications and dispense them to patients, and decreases medication errors and ADEs.

• Simple Medication Advice Through App Saves A Trip To Doctor

There are times when a patient has some medication questions regarding the prescription. Like whether or not to continue the medication if the symptoms are fled away or if there are some negative repercussions or side effects from the medicines prescribed or a request to prescribe some other brand of medicine due to unavailability of the given brand in their local area. Simply giving a thought to make a hospital visit, standing in a long waiting queue for a two minutes question can be a reason of resentment for any person and eventually, may persuade the patient to make a self decision.

In such cases, a quick consultation or advice on telemedicine app can come as a big respite. This way, a person can attach an image of the prescription; ask a question to doctor by text or if necessary, book a call and make a face-to-face conversation.

Related: Unveil the Doctor on Demand or Telemedicine App Development Cost and Features

Telemedicine App Development Challenges

• UI/UX Design Implementation

A telemedicine app requires two separate apps, one for Doctors and other for Patients. While designing a user interface and user experience for a telemedicine app it is very much important to ensure smooth interaction between the Patient and Doctor. Since a single UX pitfall will fail to get the much needed attention. So make sure the UX is great and glitch free because a distressed patient cannot afford any cognitive load. And eventually will be provoked to uninstall the app and leave negative reviews.

• iOS & Android Native App Development

You will be required to build mobile apps for two user roles i.e. Patient and Doctor on two major platforms i.e. iOS and Android. Additionally, an Admin panel to manage patients, doctors and reports!

• Backend Integration

For a seamless communication both the apps with be integrated to a separately developed server (backend server) that holds all of the patients sensitive data and it will act as a mediator to exchange data between patient and doctor apps. Since the healthcare app contains data-sensitive information, therefore upon integration, both of the apps address encrypted requests while sending and receiving information from the server.

Revolutionize the Patient and Provider Relationship with Codiant’s Telemedicine App Solutions.

Because… we know what patients want.. What providers demand.. And we create a holistic and customized solution that makes interaction with patients seamless and fluent. An interaction that not only focuses on healthy outcomes but also impacts the bottom line.