Mobile health (mHealth) solutions can be of different types. They can be of consumer use only such as mental health trackers or have medical purposes such as remote patient monitoring apps. Basically, the mHealth market is on the rise, as per Statista data, the projected size of the mHealth mobile apps market is forecasted to reach $332 billion by 2025 compared to only $21 billion in 2016.
Mobile health makes healthcare services more flexible and available to many people who don’t have easy access to healthcare. Plus, the trend of a healthy lifestyle is spreading globally and health apps are a natural consequence of that trend. Visit the Yalantis website to learn how we can help you build a custom health app to keep up with the trends and encourage more people to take better care of their health.
This post will discuss the advantages of custom mHealth app development, technical best practices, and famous mHealth examples you can get inspiration from.
Benefits of mHealth solutions for patients
We’re already accustomed to the fact that smartphone apps can help in different aspects of our lives from tracking finances, finding a partner, and socializing with our friends to monitoring our health. In fact, now we can have almost anything we want without even leaving the house.
So let’s see how exactly people can benefit from mHealth solutions.
Convenience is the king. As simple as it sounds, it’s extremely convenient to use mHealth applications. You can monitor your mental ups and downs, track periods, and make sure you reach that 10,000 steps limit every day. There are, literally, thousands of mHealth applications to fit the individual needs of everyone.
Improved self-control. Health mobile applications can help people be more in charge of their health. For instance, an e-prescription application can send them notifications to take pills on time and make sure they follow the correct treatment.
Less paperwork. Gradually yet confidently we’re moving to paperless lives. With everything going digital, mHealth solutions are just the right way for people to keep all of their medical records on their smartphones. This way clinicians can be sure that patients won’t lose critical information about their medical conditions.
Enhanced and interactive healthcare services. Frankly speaking, there are a few people fond of visiting doctors. Most of us usually postpone the necessary appointments for a better time. Interactive mHealth applications can help people perceive their health monitoring as a much more fun experience. Such apps can contain gamification elements like getting awards for visiting clinicians on time, doing regular laboratory tests, or losing/gaining weight.
Using mHealth applications helps people cultivate many healthy habits and pay more attention to themselves. But how can you make sure your mHealth app is actually useful?
How to make your mobile health software useful and successful
To create a medical app and ensure a proper user engagement level for your mHealth application, you should choose your niche like fitness and wellness, patient monitoring, and e-prescription. Judging by the large amount of mHealth apps on the market, consider narrowing down your niche. For instance, you can build a fitness and rehabilitation application for elderly people with the possibility to book a consultation with a physician nearby.
Once you know your niche and target audience, you can proceed with the functionality your app should include. Taking the same example above, you’ll have to pay more attention to the onboarding process, making it clear for the elderly how to use the app. The UI/UX design should be also well-thought-out as well as tested on real users before the final release.
Speaking of choosing your target audience right and ensuring yourself as many users as possible, you should also take into account the popularity of such apps among different age groups. In September 2021, Statista conducted a survey on medical, health, and fitness mobile app usage among 9,134 respondents of different age groups. Researchers found out that such apps use:
62 percent of boomers
72 percent of Gen Xers
81 percent of Millennials
76 percent of Gen Zers
The findings show that health and medical apps are currently in great demand. Therefore, make sure your mHealth app can solve the real health problems of your target audience or help them improve their health habits, and you’re good to go.
In the next section, let’s discuss which technical aspects you’ll have to take into account when developing your mHealth application.
Technical aspects to consider during development
Depending on whether your future mHealth application is going to be for consumers, certain clinics’ patients, healthcare providers, or medical staff, the approach to the software development will differ. In the last three cases, you’ll have to ensure HIPAA compliance for the US (GDPR for Europe) and integration with other software solutions in the healthcare organization like medical records management solutions for proper data interoperability.
In case your mHealth application should also contain the possibility of paying the bills, you should ensure a convenient and secure way of processing payments. For example, it’s possible to connect to Apple Pay or Google Pay.
From the perspective of software architecture design, you should ensure that the application is persistent and available 24/7 and even has an offline mode in case it’s an app that can be useful for health emergency cases. Another critical aspect of mHealth applications is data protection and overall architecture security to detect and withstand malicious attacks.
You should also take into account the initial and future scalability of your application which has to do with such technology as cloud computing in healthcare. If, for example, the application is meant for a set number of medical staff, it can be designed to cope with that particular number of users and not more. However, if you’re targeting a wide range of consumers, you should share your clear system load expectations with your software development team.
When it comes to the feature set, you can switch to the next section with mHealth application examples.
Prominent examples of mHealth solutions to follow
Below are some examples of mobile applications that fulfill different user needs.
Medisafe Medication Management
An application for reminding users to take drugs. The app integrates with Apple HealthKit to get critical data about users’ physical activity, weight, pulse, and other available health information. Medisafe comes with an in-built timezone differentiator to make sure people take their pills when needed. The fun feature of the app is the possibility to choose a voice tone for the drug reminder. The app includes Darth Vader’s and Dr. Evil’s voices. It’s also possible to manage the medication treatment of the whole family from a single account.
GYANT
A diagnosing application that targets both patients and healthcare professionals. GYANT includes an AI-empowered chatbot that serves as a symptom checker and helps patients find the right clinician. In the app, patients can also manually search for clinics and book doctor appointments. Clinicians, in turn, can contact patients and manage their appointments. The gem of this app is the fact that a clinician comes prepared for the visit as they already know the general symptoms of the patient.
Pregnancy +
A helpful and fun pregnancy assistant. Future mothers can track their baby’s progress with 3D models. The app also compares the baby’s size on a certain week with the size of fruits or animals which makes it easier to comprehend the actual size of the baby. Pregnancy + prepares women for each week describing what to expect. The app also provides daily informative blog articles with pregnancy and parenthood tips and tricks. In the application, users can also find the due date calculator and contraction timer as well as search through thousands of baby names.
Each of the above mHealth applications has its particular niche. And what is also important is that each app has something unique about it like the voices of different movie characters for drug reminders, a comparison of a baby’s size with fruits, or an AI-powered symptom checker bot. That’s the ultimate recipe for success: add something unique or fun to your application. This way you can make regular and mundane things such as taking pills an experience that can bring a smile to your user’s face. Releasing pressure from such serious matters as health monitoring is what makes mHealth solutions so special.
