Telemedicine App Development: A Modern Medical Diagnosis Approach

[1] Digital Therapy

The client can book a session using the application based on the therapist’s availability. They can then hop on a video conference to go through their routine.

[2] Remote Diagnosis

The patient can mention the symptoms they have been noticing based on which the application’s chatbot follows a decision tree and decides whether to diagnose the issue itself or consult a doctor.

[3] Discuss Progress / Prescription Updates

After an offline session, the patient can remotely share updates with the doctor and ask for any changes in the prescription without the need for any additional visits.

[A] Convenient Access To Doctors

A traditional visit to the doctor’s clinic might force a patient to spend hours in the lobby waiting for their turn, even after booking an appointment weeks before. And let’s be honest, nobody wants to go through that! Telehealth apps become a life savior in this scenario, as the patients are neither forced to take a day off from work, nor waste one of their precious weekends over this. Plus, even if an appointment gets delayed for some reason they can simply reschedule it to their next calendar opening without any major hiccups!

[B] Cost Effective In Comparison to Traditional Methods

Another major factor that prompts patients to avoid medical checkups is the cost of a single appointment. Shifting to a telehealth app by leveraging telemedicine app development services takes off a significant amount of the service provider's overheads, like the facility space allotment and accommodation costs. Patients also save on travel expenses while enjoying greater options! For instance, if a patient in the UK wishes to consult a doctor who earned their MBBS in USA, Japan, or another country, they can simply book an appointment online and skip the flights. Looking at the shift in the approach of healthcare checkups, insurance companies have also started covering the cost of online consultations. Taking away yet another advantage of offline checkups.

[C] Easy Diagnosis For Remotely Located Patients

Several parts of the world still lack access to proper medical infrastructure in their local areas. They need to travel for hours for any health-related assistance. Now imagine a patient traveling for hours for a weekly checkup, reaching the clinic, and waiting for hours again. Telemedicine apps take away a major chunk of this baggage. The patient might still have to travel a few times for any major operations or tests, but traveling for regular check-ups can be completely dodged.

[D] Readily Available EHRs For Doctors

Having an EHR linked to every patient comes in handy in situations when doctors are attending patients continuously, they can quickly scan through their records before any recommendations to mitigate the room for any errors. It also acts as a handy way to update every patient's medical record in a standardized format, making it easier to refer to in the future instead of juggling through reports and prescriptions, which was the situation for a long time.

[E] Simultaneous Consultation is Possible

Using telemedicine applications, doctors attend to a higher number of patients daily. In some cases, doctors can club patients with similar symptoms in a common meeting and consult multiple patients simultaneously, on the flipside patients get quick recommendations for their non-chronic issues. As impressive as it sounds from the revenue angle, for parts of the world where the medical workforce is insufficient compared to the demand, this efficiency boost lands as a blessing.

[i] Ideation

Like every successful software, telemedicine app development requires a thorough understanding and planning of the approach and the technologies that need to be leveraged to get the best outcome from this endeavor.

[ii] Designing

Building an intuitive and easygoing layout has to be one of the highest priorities, mainly because the application will be leveraged by a vast demographic of users. If the approach is sub-optimal users may struggle to navigate through the application. It’s important to keep the instructions clear and the language as simple and basic as possible.

[iii] Select APIs

Thanks to the availability of dedicated telemedicine APIs, the developers do not have to build every single functionality from scratch. With enough research and a thorough understanding, these APIs can cut down the development time to a fraction of what the development time otherwise would have been. There are specific APIs that fit in a bunch of different use cases, we will be discussing them in an upcoming section.

[iv] Check Compliance

Speaking from experience, working on a product for the healthcare industry cannot afford any hint of slacking in the compliance area. Which is where compliance with the essential guidelines becomes a necessity. Some popular compliance checks include -

1. HIPAA or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act
2. GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation
3. FDA or Food and Drug Administration
4. HITECH or Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health
5. And other globally acknowledged & local regulatory checks.

[v] Development

With the due diligence completed, the developers start building the architecture and functionalities as per the discussed guidelines. The project is typically completed in different phases or milestones. At the end of each milestone, the clients test the progress and discuss any queries they might have, upon clarification, they give the green signal to start the development further.

[vi] QA and Testing

Once the development is over, the telemedicine app is handed over to the quality assurance team. They thoroughly check the solution across several test cases, to identify any possible issues with the application. If identified, the issue is promptly reported to the development team for a swift fix. Once resolved, the solution is double-checked before closing the ticket. Once all the raised issues are resolved, the product is officially ready to be delivered to the end users.

[vii] Deployment and Maintenance

The finished Telemedicine application is launched to the end users. In most cases, medical organizations want the application to reach as many users as possible, so Google‘s Play Store & Apple’s App Store are the ideal platforms for deployment. If the application also has a web version, a specific domain is assigned to it. Once the end users start using the application seamlessly for the first time, the development phase is officially over. The clients still have the option to keep the developers on-cue for scheduled maintenance by paying them a percentage of the development cost annually.

[a] Downloading / Visiting the Application

Once the clients get to know about the application, ideally, they would either download it from the respective app marketplace of their mobile’s OS or they would access the web application with the link provided to the domain.

For the mobile, the application page on the marketplace should describe the product in a concise but clear way. Also, it is important to make sure the reviews/ratings for the application are above 4.0 out of 5 stars. This should be the baseline for any telemedicine application.

For the web application, it is crucial to evaluate the overall SEO of the domain and make it easily accessible to the users without any crashes, or inflated loading times, leading to high bounce rates. These high bounce rates are a disaster for an application trying to gain new users and will inevitably shed away a major chunk of initial opportunity. Google’s Pagespeed insights and Search Engine Console can be a great help to uplift the SEO game.

[b] Logging In

The next standard flow in the procedure would be to get them to register as a user. Keeping the pages simple and precise should be the main focus. The application should not ask for a lot of information before offering anything to the customer. This may build up a level of frustration that may lead to form abandonment. Getting these users to come around for a second attempt will be difficult.

The best approach here would be to let them log in to the application with basic credentials like email and password (verification if necessary). Once they’re in, they will be exposed to the services that they can avail. Now when they try to access these services, the application can ask for the necessary additional information, being eager to try out the services, the chances of them abandoning a form, become significantly lower.

[c] Initial Symptoms Checkup

Once the due diligence is over, the patients are prompted to go through an initial symptom check-up to let the back end perform its diagnostics. Based on the inputs, the backend logic filters out the issue(s) the patient might be facing. In certain cases, the issue is simple and can be identified and prescribed for by the backend logic. However, when the issues cannot be determined or there is a certain degree of ambiguity, the patient is advised to book an appointment.

Some medical organizations leverage AI for the initial symptom diagnosis, while others rely on their proprietary logic. Whatever the approach might be, it is always advised to run the diagnosis through an actual doctor for approval before prescribing the patient any intense medication or antibiotics.

[d] Booking Appointment

Upon the patient’s consent, the application checks through various predefined fields to find the right healthcare expert for the patient, based on the type of issue, the doctor’s expertise, the patient’s address (in case a physical visit was required), availability of both parties and much more.

Once confirmed, the application then provides the patient with reminders about their appointment. It is crucial, as they are not visiting the clinic and are ideally attending it in between their daily busy routine.

[e] Connected To a Doctor For Diagnosis

Once connected to the doctor, there are typically two ways the appointment can go -

1. Based on the report that the application has generated, the doctor performs their own diagnosis. They may ask some additional questions with obviously a much higher level of intricacies and understanding of the situation. If that is enough to diagnose the issue, the doctor prescribes the needed medications.
2. Otherwise, the doctor recommends certain tests that might help them to get to the crux of the situation. The doctor can also ask the patient for a physical visit if needed. This is where the matchup during the appointment booking process comes in handy.

[f] Payment

The positioning of the payment phase depends on the organization's preference, some companies prefer to keep this as a mandatory requirement before the appointment, while other organizations ask you to clear the owed amount before generating a copy of the prescription, or before providing the option to schedule a second appointment.

Regardless of the position, the payment process has to be seamless, and to ensure that the application must provide multiple options for the users to make their payments. All backed by reliable payment gateways to guarantee data security and a seamless payment experience.

[g] Relevant Medication Delivered

The next step in the flow mainly occurs outside the application. A copy of the prescription that was sent to the patient is also sent to the telemedicine application’s pharmaceutical partner, along with the necessary information about the customer. The partner then creates a delivery ID and sends it to the telemedicine application and the patient. The prescribed meds are then packed and shipped to the patient’s address.

On the application, the patient can track the shipment and get updates. Depending on the network of the telemedicine application and its tie-ups, the delivery can take anywhere between a few days to a few minutes. Depending upon the e-commerce and quick commerce distribution of the collaborating pharmaceutical companies.

[h] Follow-Up Checks

After a decided time frame. The application finally prompts the patients for an update on their health via notifications or a simple call. If the response hints towards them being fully recovered, the application can ask for concluding feedback. In other situations -

1. Improved health but not entirely
2. No progress whatsoever

The app suggests scheduling another appointment so that the doctor can further diagnose the situation and make decisions accordingly.