Now the majority of Americans, at least 96% (according to statistics) own a smartphone. Such a spread of devices has helped to evolve the healthcare sector – one way or another, a healthy lifestyle prolongs it, everyone will agree with this. With the exponential growth of interest in the field of healthcare, developers have to pay more and more attention to healthcare issues – what users want, why and how a digital application can handle it.
Developing apps in the healthcare industry is a serious business. In the literal sense, developers work with the lives of users, and there is nowhere without a high level of qualification, communication with medical institutions and constant monitoring of the market.
Medical workers need help too
The first thing to think about when developing a healthcare application is to stop thinking of users as ordinary customers of App Store and Google Play for a while and start thinking of them as patients. The needs of this target audience must be taken into account daily – trends change, new drugs appear on the market every day, and people change their treatment preferences even more often. The right application should not only solve all the problems of a standard patient of the clinic – speed up the appointment with the doctor, track the medical history, give out all the necessary medicines on time. The application should be a closed loop, with all the correct emphasis on privacy, which is associated with open and convenient feedback from the attending physician. Healthcare software testing also can require a specific approach – pay necessary attention to all the details. Remember – your development proficiency is a people’s lives.
It is also worth remembering the hard work of the staff of private and public clinics. Among the most common problems for doctors and nurses are the following:
- Moral and physical burnout associated with increased workloads both at work and outside of it – doctors constantly need to memorize a huge amount of information;
- Process inefficiencies due to the overly complicated healthcare bureaucracy. Imagine – each queue is a correspondingly tall stack of documents, each with its own regulatory standards that must be followed;
- Continuous decline in patient satisfaction associated with low levels of service. In developed countries, the problem is especially acute – medical insurance is the lion’s share of the income of private and public clinics. Failure to provide the services of a qualified specialist in time means losing a patient, or even an entire sponsored company.
Out of the box ideas for healthcare applications
When developing healthcare applications, you should understand that there are more health problems than you think. Sometimes, instead of trying to push the pharmaceutical giants of the industry, you should think outside the box and carve out a unique niche.
In particular, doctors and patients may be interested in the following applications:
- Applications for tracking mental illness. Psychiatric health problems are not as rare as they might seem at first glance. For many years, these issues have been hushed up, and only in the last few years, the healthcare industry has turned its attention to the problems of the mental spectrum. Creating applications to track the mental state of patients means making millions. Now this niche is empty;
- Sleep tracking apps. Due to the acceleration of the pace of life, a huge part of the people do not get enough sleep regularly. This can eventually lead to serious health problems. In this regard, there is some demand for applications related to sleep tracking – in particular, guides on sleep hygiene, white noise, somnambulism indicators and special sounds that promote healthy sleep can be useful;
- Users may be massively interested in smartwatch apps. Now this niche is gradually being mastered by developers, and one of the most optimal applications of smart watches is to use them as a fitness tracker. Apps that extend the capabilities of standard vital sign frameworks to make users healthier and developers richer;
- Applications that track the menstrual cycle. The female audience is half of the entire application market, it is worth remembering this. Creating an app that is exclusively targeted at a female audience can be a real gamble, but if enough attention is paid to quality and functionality, it can get a very good start-up.
For the application of the health sector, it is worth carefully studying the market. Even now, when the operating system stores are boiling with the number of all kinds of applications, you can find a unique niche. You need to think outside the box, and thanks to your own skills, with the help of a team of qualified developers, you can create a unique product. Competition in the healthcare industry has grown over the past few years, yet it is not as intense as in other niches such as gaming or business process optimization.