5 Things You Need to Know Before Creating a Doctor Finder & Booking App

Basic Components of a Doctor Booking Web App

A good doctor booking web app comprises a broad feature set that helps find all the necessary information about the staff of a clinic, make an appointment, and pay for it. Most healthcare apps include such features as:

• Online data storage. Doctor finder app allows organizing all the input information of both doctors and patients in their profiles.
• Filters. People can find doctors and clinics by filters that supposed to select the best option for them according to search criteria.
• Usage of geo-position. If you let an application track your geolocation, it could find the closest clinic or available specialist to your home or workplace.
• Online booking system. Medical appointments web app allow a user to book or cancel doctor visit through the Internet. People can find a particular clinic or doctor, pick up a time suitable for them, and schedule their appointment.
• Day-and-night communication. Doctors app provides a 24/7 connection (via chat, audio, or video).
• Online payments. People can add a credit card to their account, and the program will charge them automatically depending on the cost of the procedure.
• In-app notifications. A doctor phone app has a function of notifying a patient and a doctor about the scheduled appointment. Push notifications will also remind patients when they need to take medicine.
• Doctor reviews. Doctors’ profiles contain a reviews section where any user can learn about previous patients experience.
• Online Prescriptions. There is no need to keep small notes and all the papers with medical prescriptions when you can have it on your phone. A web application for a doctor appointment allows your doctor to send out all the important information about drugs and dosages.

An informative and suitable for users application will have high demand and will be profitable for its owners.

How to Monetize Your Business?

There are five ways how you can gain profit from a doctor finder app:

• Offer a subscription. You may create a system where the app users (both doctors and patients) will need to pay for using their accounts. There might be an option to buy a monthly or yearly subscription.
• Sponsored program. For an additional fee, you can offer doctors and medical institutions to be placed at the top of the list which will increase odds that a potential patient will contact them.
• On-demand service. Your doctor scheduling web app can also include a range of additional on-demand services like, for instance, blood and urine collection at home, drugs delivery, or home consultation.
• Premium services. You can offer to buy a premium account which will give access to some extra services. For example, they will provide an opportunity to get a detailed consultation from a specialist by video, or free medicaments delivery, or get a medical prescription in the online regime.
• Fee per appointment. You can take a few percents from the sum of every transaction done in your application.

Is It a Good Startup Idea to Launch a Doctor Appointment Online App?

In 2019, when a significant part of our everyday activities shifted online, people got used to dealing with frictionless Internet bookings. Even phone calls recede into the past, and modern users prefer to order any service via applications. Why the healthcare industry has to be an exception?

A doctor appointment web app is a valuable startup idea that will pay for itself and bring profit in a short time. Various surveys show that people are ready to pay for such services. So why not to give it to them?

Discuss your future medical appointments web app with the Gearheart professional team for free>>

The Most Famous “Find A Doctor” Web Apps

There are a lot of online services which allow you to book a doctor appointment. The most popular ones are listed below:

Practo

It is one of the most successful online platforms for finding a doctor on the Internet. Being founded in India in early 2008, in a decade, it developed into the biggest doctor search service in Asia. It deals with about 25 million clients and cooperates with more than 100,000 doctors.

Characteristics:

• Contains a database of specialists from all over the country
• Allows users to book appointments or contact a doctor
• Online data storage
• Blog about healthcare and medicine
• Reminders to take medicine
• Medicine delivery service

ZocDoc

It is an American online doctor app which operates all across the 50 states. Their motto is to solve all patients’ problems. Contains a reference section that aimed at helping a user to pick the best doctor for themselves.

Special features:

• Allows users to find a doctor and contact them online
• Detailed doctor profiles with reviews from patients
• Advanced search system (by doctor name or by practice name)
• Uses geolocation for finding doctors in your area
• Push notifications which remind patients about their next appointment

Healthtap

Another American medical appointments service and doctor consult web app that works across 200+ countries. Just under 150,000 of professional medical workers have a Healthtap profile. They helped to 350 million people from all around the world and answered more than 7 billion answers in the online regime.

Characteristics:

• Helps to find an answer to your health-related questions
• Allows to keep in touch with doctors 24/7
• In-app reminders
• Offers an online consultation from a professional
• Online guidance regarding your health and lifestyle

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Web Doctor Appointment App?

If you are seriously thinking about how to create a find a doctor web app, you must consider some technical details which are unavoidable in business. One of the most important steps of this process is the stage of preparation.

The pre-development stage includes:

• Outlining your purposes and discovering the target audience. Decide on what your program will be focused — whether it’s a scheduling app for a private clinic, or an online service for consulting customers, or a multidirectional platform which covers all the clinics and hospitals in the city. Proceeding from this, estimate an approximate number of potential patients.
• Defining functional requirements. Ensure that your application will be equally useful for different devices:
• Desktop version
• iOS app
• Android app
• Thinking out a work plan. A roadmap will help you to stick to the initial ideas avoiding unnecessary spontaneous changes and expenses.
• Planning budget. Evaluate your resources, do research, and estimate what kind of application you can create for this money. On first stages do not invest big sums into advertising and the name of the app. At first, you have to ensure that the technical side of it functionates as it has to do.

Prices

It is difficult to give you exact numbers of how much the development of your future doctor booking program costs. It all depends on your requirements and features you would like to have in a final product. Nevertheless, here are some figures that will help you to estimate your expenses.

• Prices for creating a prototype for such a website start from $5,000.
• Developing a minimum viable product to enter the market - from $10,000.
• Further development of the website, adding new features and creating a mobile version - from $20,000.

Things You Have To Consider If You Want To Create A Doctor Online App

You should understand that the development of the web application is not only about a beautiful and useful program. Since you are going to deal with people’s personal information, you need to care about how and where this data will be stored and provide its safety.

Essential elements for data security:

• Compliance to data security regulation rules. The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability of Act) rules and GDPR General Data Protection Regulation) policy to keep your application legal.
• Medical certification. You need to check the medical licenses doctor should have. As long as you are going to cooperate with different specialists, you must ensure that they have all the necessary documents and valid diploma.
• Data encryption. Asking a client to add some personal information to their profile you guarantee them that this information will not be disclosed. That is why the encryption of the data has to be applied in such apps.
• Automatic backup. For keeping all data safe, you cannot contain it all in one place. Data should be backed up regularly so that any piece of information will not be lost.

Our Experience With Online Apps

We have substantial experience with developing various products. In particular, we have cooperated with such projects as Traveloom, Raftol, and Otipo.

Otipo is a web program that allows to schedule working shifts online. Even though Otipo was not designed exclusively for medical workers, it is very popular among doctors and nurses as it significantly simplifies the planning of their schedule.

We have also worked with a medical application called Appworx. This web program is one of the most advanced medical photography platforms primarily oriented on plastic surgery and aesthetics industry in medicine. Functionating in 18 countries, it stores more than 1.5 million photos “before/after”.

Even though Appworx is used by over 1000 clinicians and even more patients, it does not have an online booking system. It is more of a clinical photography tool than a doctor finder web app.

Wrap It Up

The healthcare system is rapidly developing, and people eagerly change over classical booking over a call to web programs and online applications.

Online doctor web app is a useful idea for patients and doctors. It saves the time of both parties: patients skip waiting long hours in the queues arriving at the clinic in time of their appointment, and doctors having all necessary information in patient’s profile do not need to deal with piles of paperwork.

If you decided to create a medical booking application, you need to think about what features your future app will have, how to guarantee the protection of your clients’ data, and how to make this project profitable for you. Price of creating such service varies depending on your demands, but the approximate cost of developing a minimum viable product fluctuates with website development prices on the market.

Even though there are a lot of famous doctor apps like Practo or ZocDoc, there always can be more. If you have an original idea on how to make a doctor booking app do not hesitate and put it in place!

Contact Gearheart to discuss your doctor appointment web app with our team for free>>