Understanding the Healthcare Mobile Application Development Life Cycle

The technological smartphone revolution has ushered in mobile application development and empowers every industry with successful solutions to tap into new business opportunities and cater to a broader audience in real-time. The healthcare industry is no exception, and healthcare applications are making the lives of doctors, patients, and healthcare institutions easier with better healthcare information exchange.

Along with this, a torrent of creativity was followed as applications for various other facilities was released, such as yoga, nutrition, exercise, insurance verification, and more. Healthcare mobile applications simplify medical processes and improve the patient experience significantly. According to Statista, the mobile health market is expected to continue growing in the coming years and will exceed 300 billion US dollars by 2025.

Healthcare applications are under more scrutiny than most categories of applications due to their incorporated features, such as HIPAA regulations. App development for healthcare usually has varied stakeholders, including doctors, health professionals, administrative staff, and patients, compared to other apps that primarily focus on a homogenous consumer base and monolithic user experience.

Before understanding the healthcare mobile app development lifecycle, it is crucial to understand the different types of medical applications available in the market. If you are aware of your app requirements, you can move ahead with its development; however, understanding the different medical apps can help your business tap new areas directly proportional to the immense growth of your organization.

Types of Medical Apps

The type of medical application affects the whole healthcare mobile app development process, especially the product’s functionality, data security level, and necessary integrations. Based on user personas, the medical apps are divided into two segments: consumers (general public) and professionals (health administrators and medical facilities). Let’s overview some commonly recognized medical apps:

Fitness or lifestyle apps

Fitness apps or lifestyle apps are those apps that aim to educate patients and users by offering a fitness routine or exercise necessary to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Users can explore effective workouts with customized workout plans. Pregnancy tracker apps also fall under this category, including everything about pregnancy and baby development health apps, diet monitoring, healthy nutrition, exercise guides, and fitness tracking apps.

Telepharmacy

Mobile Healthcare application development can help manage users’ medication, track their disease, and share data with caregivers and doctors. Telepharmacy apps involve disruptive technologies like AI, Big Data to facilitate personalization and enable preventative interventions. You can also order your medicines within the app and check the progress of the clinical and diagnostic tests.

Professional healthcare apps

Professional healthcare apps are intended to bring value to physicians, doctors, nurses, and other staff at medical facilities. These complex apps involve high-level functionalities such as medical networking, accounting, diagnosis, records, health monitoring, and more. However, they are becoming mainstream as they offer a robust HIE architecture between the stakeholders, especially patients.

The healthcare mobile application development lifecycle

Now, that you are familiar with the type of medical apps, let’s understand the mobile healthcare application development cycle. It can be explained in 6 different phases or stages:

Business Analysis

The foundation for building a successful healthcare application is understanding your core business requirements. It will help you identify where the application fits in your business model and who are the end-users of your application. An in-depth analysis of your business will help you understand the end-users requirements, application goals, and what precisely each user group will use the application for.

Based on specific questions like this, you can consider the different features that will increase the user experience for each user group. For instance, the patient’s user interface must be simple and easy to use compared to UI for administrative staff as they will receive more training on the systems.

UI Design

Next is a very crucial phase in the mobile healthcare app development life cycle, the User Interface design. In order to balance user groups and their perspective needs, a UI/UX focus is necessary to implement a better design for stakeholders. This phase is an exploratory phase where UI/UX designers can show their creativity and put their app ideas into reality.

This stage requires a high level of brainstorming to discuss all great ideas and concepts like you. Businesses and healthcare android app development service providers must have sessions regarding the UI designs to identify what’s best for users and other stakeholders. You must not ignore essential functionalities and security protocols while designing user interfaces.

Agile Development

After the first two stages of analyzing and UI designing, we enter the stage of development. It is the most crucial phase of the application development lifecycle as it involves the core programming development of the app. Before starting with a fully deployed app version, make sure to demand an MVP development. An MVP will help you analyze whether your efforts are in line with the objectives or not. The reviews from different groups can also help you understand the necessity of various features.

While the product is in development, hold weekly sprint meetings to allow teams to communicate with each other to discuss the progress and development goals for the near future. You can navigate bumps, make changes, and solve problems instantly with consistent scrum and sprint meetings.

Integration

The next phase is the Integration phase. During the development phase, we need to ensure that the app can communicate with various databases, software, and APIs that your business needs. However, while integrating a third-party application within the app, the risk of breaking down and becoming unstable increases as the dependency on the third-party app providers increases.

For every integration to the healthcare mobile application, some sort of debugging and creative problem-solving approach is required. This is why business analysis and agile development are very important for the overall development lifecycle of your mobile application.

Security and HIPAA Compliances

Healthcare organizations have the responsibility of protecting patients’ personal and official information. Due to this, security is always the highest priority while developing a healthcare application. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) defines the lawful use and disclosure of protected health information (PHI). As PHI will be stored and accessed to your healthcare app, it is a must to ensure that this information is secure and accessible only to authorized users.

HIPAA violations can range from monetary fines to criminal charges and can’t be ignored. Hence, while developing a healthcare application, make sure to adhere to HIPAA guidelines and minimize any risk of infractions.

Maintenance

Most organizations think that once an application is deployed on the play store, it does not require attention. However, it isn’t true. Mobile health app development is a continuous process involving consistent application maintenance. Over time, you need to update the mobile application as you might find a more feasible database to store your data, or your users might encounter some bugs over time. App maintenance also allows you to adhere to the changing trends, and your application is always up to date to deliver the best user interaction.

Wrapping up!

Hope you understand the healthcare mobile application development cycle. Many organizations and healthcare app development companies understand that mobile health application development is a never-ending process as long as the application is functional. As users continue to use your healthcare application into the future, the need to scale it increases. Moreover, as the healthcare app gains more users and reviews, you gain more insights into what you can do to improve the user experience or remove that hinders a user-friendly support element. Because of the changing trends, user expectations, and competitive edge, you need to stay updated on the highest level and evolve while maintaining your app functionality.