How to Make Doctor Appointment App That Streamlines the Process?

When it comes to talking about the terms “healthcare mobile app development” and mHealth applications”, both have appeared not so long ago.

Even, both these terms were introduced to the public in answer to the global digitalization of nearly every aspect of people’s lives. There is no doubt that mobile applications in the healthcare industry are in huge demand, not only among patients but also among physicians.

According to Research2guidance.com, there were approximately 259, 000 mHealth applications published in the app stores in 2016; whereas, the global healthcare industry will reach $280 billion by 2021. As of 2017, the share of mobile healthcare sector is $26 billion. So, you can imagine how fast the mobile healthcare market is expanding.

If you have also decided to have your own appointment scheduler app that allows your patients to schedule an appointment, you can go through this blog and know how to make a medical appointment app that streamlines the entire process of scheduling an appointment.

Some Important Tips to Consider While Developing an App

• Provide a Solution to Any Problem: There are various medical and health applications on the web, but not all are giving solutions to problems. If you wanted to make a doctor appointment app, you should a solution to any problem that your patients are facing.
• Define a Purpose: Before you end-up developing an app, you should define a purpose. You should clarify the key reasons and objectives why you wanted to make an appointment app for your patients. As you need to clear all these things with the developer while describing your idea to him.
• Make a list of Features: You should also make a list of features that you want to include in your medical appointment app because healthcare is quite sensitive sector, so ensuring that your medical appointment app meets requirements of patients.
• Direct Communication with the Doctor: Every patient expects to directly communicate with the doctor, so you should give an option in your app, allowing patients to directly communicate with you and book an appointment to meet personally.

Crucial Features to Include in Doctor Appointment App:

Do you know that there are only 11% of healthcare apps that have necessary features? While rest of the apps have some useless features that are not important for patients. This is the reason, you need to think twice before you make an appointment application for your patients.

Here are some of the major features that you must include in your app and enable patients to get desired services:

Search Option

The search option is one of the most important features that you should include in your application. You can allow your patients to search your clinic and anything that they are looking for. They can search for the location of the clinic as per their preference. It will allow them to search based on the service type, city, country and timings.

Doctor’s Profile

Once, patient searches for different options like doctors, specialization of doctor, location, etc. he needs to check out the profile of the doctor he/she selects. It is must that in your doctor appointment app, you include this feature so that patients can look the profile of doctors.

You can also include some of the below-mentioned details:

• Competence: Make sure to include doctor’s specialty, professional certificates, experience, etc.
• Location: It is important that in doctor’s profile, the location should give the exact location of doctor. By considering a distance counter, you can even much better do it.
• Photos: You can also include some of the pictures of doctor’s clinic or workplace.
• Reviews: Mentioning ratings and reviews from previous patients would be a great benefit for your new patients.

Book an Appointment Module

Another important feature that you need to consider is booking module that will allow your patients to book their appointments by filling up an appointment booking form wherein they will also have the option to make the payments in both offline and online.

Moreover, patients will find it a lot easy to book appointments as per their convenience and they can fill the details like their name, age, sex, preferred timing, contact information and the reason for the appointment.

Payment Method

Payment method also needs to include as patients have to pay for the service or doctors’ fees. However, various general hospital admissions, emergency rooms, visit a doctor are followed with medical bills. To give your patients’ rich experience, it would be good option to add the ability to pay online.

Apart from this, some of the other features that you can consider while making doctor appointment app are analytics, social integration, push notifications, access to HER/EMR, reviews, etc.

Driving Directions

Driving directions is also an essential feature to provide your patients, who are not aware of the location. You can provide an in-app guide to the doctor’s clinic and office. By adding this feature in your application, you can add great value to your app, allowing patients to reach your clinic without any hassle.

Conclusion

So, these are the most important features of a doctor appointment application that will streamline the entire process of booking an appointment. With such apps, patients can book an appointment directly from their home or anywhere and save their time.

Moreover, they can also get various other benefits like getting driving directions, check doctor’s profile, check rating and reviews, etc. So, if you got an idea for doctor appointment application, you can discuss it with any leading doctor appointment app development company that has already developed such apps.

Guest article written by: Jyoti Bharwani