As the percentage of people using mHealth keeps growing, the demand for healthcare apps is inevitable. The market for healthcare applications is expected to exceed $300 billion dollars by 2025. So if you are trying to figure out whether developing a healthcare app is a good idea, now is as good a time as ever. There are two main challenges when developing healthcare apps – development and compliance. While developing healthcare apps is complex, ensuring that your app complies with HIPAA is a much bigger challenge. Here’s what you need to know about developing a healthcare mobile app in 2022.
Define Your Target Audience
To build a successful healthcare mobile app, you need to know your target audience. You really need industry-specific insights if you are to come up with an effective app that can solve real problems. Every significant decision you will make requires you to know the needs and pet peeves of your potential users.
Prototyping
Before diving straight into the development of your app, you should consider investing more in finalizing the concept of your app. The best way to do this is through prototyping. This is basically a process where you flesh out the medical features of your app into clickable screens that resemble a real-life product. There are several advantages to having a prototype before you build the actual app. For instance, the prototype will allow you to experience the app on your mobile device as if you were working with the finished product. This will allow you to quickly get the concept of your app in the hands of users for A/B testing.
Once you have your prototype, it’s important to sit with a developer and verify whether all the features you have are feasible on your selected platforms. The good thing about prototypes is that they are cheaper to work with. You will find that fixing design flaws during the prototype stage is a lot cheaper than during development. If you work with the right medical device manufacturer or mobile app developer, you can even get a free design audit for your prototype.
Find Relevant Mobile Applications/Connected Devices Experts
As mentioned before, apart from the development part of things, you also need to invest a lot in HIPAA compliance. HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This act deals with things like the protection of patient data and the reduction of healthcare costs, among others. However, the bit you should be focused on when developing a healthcare mobile app is the act’s requirement for protection against data fraud. So what happens if you fail to meet HIPAA requirements? In two words, expensive fines that can cost you millions of dollars.
So how do you ensure that you meet all HIPAA requirements? The best way is to seek guidance from an expert. It’s always best to work with a third-party expert who can consult and audit your system. In some instances, it might also be a good idea to outsource the entire HIPAA-compliant app development process to an experienced team. A team that can develop your app and ensure that it’s HIPAA-compliant will save you a lot of time and money. Once the app development process is complete, you should also ensure that your patients’ sensitive data is encrypted. It’s important to use several levels of encryption so that there are no security breaches even when a device is stolen.
Security Maintenance and App Testing
When you now have your functional healthcare mobile app, you need to ensure that it’s tested after every update. This is crucial to keep your healthcare mobile application safe. The tools, libraries, and frameworks that are used to build apps are constantly receiving updates. Once you are done building your HIPAA compliant app, you need to ensure that they are updated regularly to prevent security breaches.
Are You Ready to Build Your Mobile Applications/Connected Devices?
Finding the right experts to build Mobile Applications/Connected Devices is difficult. If you are looking for the right partner, C3 Medical can provide the plan and people you need to build a compliant and successful product. We provide a well-defined process that outlines all the steps needed to reach your goal. We’ve helped a lot of people like you steer clear of the common pitfalls that lead to the wastage of financial resources and time. Protecting user data and integrating a healthcare mobile application into a HIPAA compliant system is a non-trivial task that should be taken seriously. Get in touch with us today if you are interested in working with us. We would love to hear from you.
