The medical sector is one of those fields that has experienced some radical changes with the integration of technological innovation.
The existing quality and precision of modern health care were inconceivable a couple of decades ago.
Technological advancement is revolutionizing the health care sector at an unfathomable speed. The Doctor on Demand mobile app is the product of this revolution.
This business model serves not only users or patients but doctors as well. The best part is, that doctors can provide their advice and medical assistance to users remotely via a phone application.
For users, this is a fast, affordable, and convenient way of getting optimum health care.
The ease of availability of medical assistance is one of the best features, and because of that, Doctor on Demand Mobile applications are making waves in the modern application marketplace.
The average time between booking an appointment with a doctor and consulting him/her is 72 hours. This means if you want to consult a doctor about your health, it will take more or less 72 hours.
Hence, if this conventional way continues, then this time will keep on increasing and it will get tougher to get medical services on time. This overall scenario leads to some major health risks.
So, what’s the solution?
The solution is the Doctor on Demand app. Everyone has smartphones, which make doctors available on patients’ phones at any time they need.
With the help of a Doctor on Demand app, a user can connect to the doctor within 3 minutes and consult in an emergency.
With a touch of technology, the waiting time of 72 hours was reduced to a mere 3 minutes.
Total Funding of USD $223 million
No. of Downloads: 500,000+
Monetization: Subscription, Sponsored Results
Total Funding of USD $160.23 million
No. of Downloads: 1,000,000+
Monetization: Simple Pricing, a Fixed fee for each virtual visit
Total Funding of USD $88.3 Million.
No. of Downloads: 1,000,000+
Monetization: Freemium business model, Enterprise programs
According to a report by Grand View Research, the global mHealth market is likely to cross the $112 billion mark by 2025 with a CAGR of 44.2%.
In addition, according to Statista, mobile healthcare applications will be the largest contributor to the revenue of the digital healthcare market.
Statista predicts the projected mobile health market size worldwide from 2016 to 2025. The total global mHealth market is predicted to reach nearly 333 billion U.S. dollars in 2025.
It is certain that we are talking about the billions here. This is why the Digital Healthcare industry is attracting so many investors from even outside of the medical industry. An application is a simplified medium that connects patients to doctors and psychologists.
The focus is to make medical services available, personal, and affordable for all. And when a service is easily available, people tend to use the service more often. It further translates into the inevitable drastic growth of the market.
Therefore, there are limitless opportunities in the digital health industry with the help of doctor on demand app development.
All you need is some expert and professional on-demand mobile app developers who can offer you a successful business model with a comprehensive revenue model. A robust and user-friendly mHealth app will promote itself.
A report was prepared earlier in 2018, which showed the percentage of monetization tactics that healthcare apps go by with:
Even if each telemedicine app has its own unique logic, the average flow of the doctor-on-demand app is as follows:
Source:- Wikimedia
For the USA, the following are some Medical Acts, certifications, and App integrations with which the Doctor on Demand app must comply.
While developing a Doctor on Demand application, it is crucial to define all potential revenue-building methods. It is noteworthy to know that creativity and imagination can help you invent more ways to make revenue from a Doctor Appointment app.
Here are the top three and most popular revenue models that you may consider in your application.
This is a simple and comprehensive revenue model. In this case, a user or patient pays directly to the doctor for the medical services and a certain commission of that fee goes to the application owner.
The application provides doctors with a platform to expand the area of their services and in return, the doctor pays a commission to the app.
A Doctor on Demand application is a platform and on this platform, there can be hundreds of doctors and laboratories.
This abundance makes it hard for some doctors and labs to come into the spotlight and get the attention of patients.
Therefore, paid featured listing helps them to appear at the top of the search results for patients whenever they search for any specific medical help.
Some labs and pharmaceutical or other healthcare industries may want to show some ads in the apps to get the attention of users.
In-app advertisement helps users to get to know about popular medical service providers and these service providers pay applications to show their advertisements within the app.
So these are some of the common revenue models of the Doctor on Demand mobile application. But first, it is important to introduce the app to the users and let them know about its advanced functionalities so that they can benefit from them and start using the app whenever they want.
Talking about functionalities, it is the feature list of a doctor’s on-demand app that helps an app to become a favorite among users. Let’s shed some light on this aspect as well.
No doubt the end-users of a Doctor on Demand app are the ones who need medical assistance. But in reality, there are 3 end users of a Doctor Appointment Booking app, Users, Doctors, and Admins.
Therefore, the feature list of all three users would be different. What are these features? Let’s take a look.
Web/Mobile Panel | Doctor’s Profile |
---|---|
Appointments Status | Manage Appointments |
Accept & Reject Request | Track User location |
Give Online Prescriptions | Refill Medication |
Patient Progression Chart | Access Patient history & documents |
Check Earning |
Social Sign Up/Login | Create a User Profile |
---|---|
Upload Documents | Dynamic Search Radius |
Doctor identification | Advanced Search Filters |
Tracking Doctor’s Location | Book Appointment OR Home Visit |
In-APP, Chat, Calling, Video | Electronic Medical Record |
Setup Profile | Post Appointment Requests |
Loyalty Programs | Prescription and medication tracker |
Email, SMS & push notification Alerts | Multiple Payment Modes |
Provide Review & Rating |
Manage Users & Doctors | CMS for News & Articles |
---|---|
Marketing Tools | Real-time Analytics |
Communication channels | Report generation |
Notification Module |
Apart from the common features, these advanced features complement the overall user experience of a Doctor on Demand app.
Almost all applications have adopted social media accounts for signing up and signing in to the apps. This feature saves users from remembering too many login IDs and passwords.
In addition, social media accounts also help users to share or recommend the application to their social media connections.
Features like in-app cameras sound so common but possess massive potential in them. The in-app camera features can be used to scan documents, for video calls for clicking pictures of symptoms to be shown to the doctor, etc.
A call (video and voice) or chatting helps patients to be more personal with the doctor. A personal and detailed conversation helps doctors to diagnose patients accurately, which leads to effective treatment.
Real-time tracking comes into action when a patient schedules a private visit with a doctor. The patient can track the current location of the doctor in the in-app navigation and get the ETA in an emergency.
An in-built cost calculator calculates the cost of services like online appointments, personal visits, medicine costs, lab costs, and many more.
The purpose of this feature is to provide an estimation of the overall cost for the complete treatment of a user.
Push notification is an integral part of the featured repertoire of every modern application. It provides important alerts, updates, and reminders to the users in the form of pop-up notifications on their phones, in order to keep them up to date with their app activities.
The plan is to make the on-demand doctor app a complete system that helps a patient from the initial conversation with a doctor to scheduling medication.
This medication reminder helps patients to take their medicines on time. It sends an alert at the scheduled time as a push notification to remind the patient that it is time to take their medicines.
This feature is exclusive to admins only. This feature helps admins to track real-time activities such as the number of active patients, doctors, and many other essential statistics on the application.
Multiple payment options project flexibility to the user to pay from any payment mode. There can be a debit card, credit card, PayPal, eWallet, or any other payment mode.
Document sharing lets patients share their medical records and previous prescription with the doctor. It helps the doctor to understand the medical history of the patients. This additional feature goes a long way in the diagnosis process.
For a better document-sharing experience, a document scanning feature is also introduced in the on-demand doctor application.
The document scanning feature enhances the image of the document and processes it into a sharp image that is easy to read and comprehend.
Content Manage System (CMS) is yet another admin-exclusive feature that lets admin manage entire visible content available on the Doctor on Demand application. The most common tasks are, adding, removing, manipulating, and managing the content of the app.
Customer relation management (CRM) is a crucial feature that defines how the Doctor on Demand application maintains its relationship with its patients. By utilizing CRM in creative ways, admins can sustain a satisfactory and long-lasting relationship with the users.
Those patients who are regular users and have achieved a certain milestone of application usage are applicable for loyalty programs that contain various discounts and offers. This feature also helps in solidifying the relationship with the users.
The task of managing all medical records for a patient can be really tedious. EHR helps users to keep their medical records saved online within the app and it can be sent in a PDF file to the email address of a user.
This advanced yet crucial feature allows users to check if their prescribed medications and treatments are covered by the insurance right after bill generation. This feature makes insurance claiming as simple as a few clicks.
Marketing & Promotional tools are for doctors who want to give some extra added benefits to the patients such as discount coupons or offers on medical bills, etc.
This additional convenience lets users pay in multiple currencies. Therefore, the currency is not an obstacle between a patient and a good medical service.
Features like this make apps like Doctor on Demand accessible to all. Everyone has the right to receive good medical services regardless of their language or dialect. This is why an app that supports multiple languages helps everyone who is in need.
Hence, these were some essential and potential features for a Doctor on Demand application. Now let’s move to the development part. How do you get a mHealth app that reigns in the application marketplace?
The first step is to get the right team of experienced and expert medical app developers who have worked on such platforms several times and have shown successful results.
The mobile application development of a doctor appointment booking app is way different from any other conventional app development.
Because a medical app has to work according to the norms and compliance of the digital medical regulatory federation of any country and state.
These norms vary according to the geographical location in which the service is to be provided.
Therefore, it gets absolutely essential to get the support of only experienced mobile app developers who have contributed significantly to the field of mHealth app development.
There are various factors that may affect the cost of developing a Doctor On Demand application. These factors are the geographical location of app development, the number of features, and the availability of applications on multiple platforms like Android, iOS, and Wearables.
The geographical location of the selected mobile app development firm affects the overall cost because in the USA the per hour cost of a developer is USD $150-$250 and in Eastern Europe, it is USD $120-$180.
However, in Asian countries like India, the hourly price of a developer varies somewhere between USD $40-$80.
The number of features is also a pivotal aspect while calculating the overall cost of an on-demand mobile app. For an Minimal Viable Product (MVP) version of the Doctor on Demand app, the cost starts from USD $30,000.
If the app is to be built for multiple platforms and with advanced features, then the cost may go beyond USD $80,000.
The old normal has been replaced by the new normal after the pandemic of COVID-19 struck the globe.
There are many new standards in the “new normal,” but the most important one is that everything you need will be delivered right to your home.
Creating a smartphone app that connects patients in need to the doctors who can help them at any given time is a great idea that should be implemented as early as possible.