Telemedicine app development: from idea to post-release support

You should adopt or develop a telehealth app in line with your healthcare facility’s needs. Don’t rush into development merely to keep up with the growing trend (propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic) of adopting telehealth solutions. On the other hand, if you do have a clear vision of how a telehealth software system can benefit your business, you should understand what the telemedicine software development process consists of. For that reason, we’ve prepared a comprehensive guide to telehealth benefits, critical components of a telehealth app, architectural specifics, suitable technologies, implementation tips, and a quick glimpse into the future of telehealth technology.

How can medical practices benefit from creating a telemedicine app?

Telemedicine system development can help your medical practice in many ways. Let’s take a look at some of the most common yet valuable benefits:

The possibility to attract and retain more patients and reduce the rates of no-shows and hospital readmissions

A telehealth solution can help medical practices increase their patient reach and attract more patients from rural locations. In this way, medical practices can increase revenue and expand their service offerings. Plus, a telehealth product can increase loyalty of existing patients by allowing them to request healthcare services more frequently and quickly consult with their clinicians about treatment plans or medication dosages. 

Thanks to telemedicine development, medical practices can decrease patient no-shows, as visiting doctors virtually is much easier than coming to a facility in person. Plus, patients can receive in-app notifications about upcoming visits, increasing the likelihood that they’ll show up on time. With telehealth solutions, physicians can also improve remote patient monitoring and reduce hospital readmissions, which often happen because of inconsistent or incorrect home care.

Improved patient experience and increased workflow efficiency

Telemedicine software can also help you increase patient satisfaction. With a functional mobile telehealth app, patients can easily book and manage appointments, get reminders on upcoming visits, and track their treatment progress. For patients with serious chronic diseases, in-person visits can be especially difficult, and with a convenient mobile telemedicine app, patients can receive necessary care without leaving their homes.

Developing a telemedicine app can also improve overall efficiency at a healthcare facility by decreasing patient wait times, reducing treatment costs, and providing healthcare practitioners with more flexible schedules. In addition, physicians can perform group consultations with several patients at once (ensuring that patients don’t see and hear each other), saving much time and delivering more value. 

Common components of a telehealth software solution

In most cases, a telehealth solution is a multi-component ecosystem that consists of both patient-facing and clinician-facing mobile and/or web applications. Here are a few typical components of such a solution:

• Videoconferencing. A telemedicine app should allow patients and clinicians to securely communicate with each other via video or audio.
• Appointment scheduling. When using a telehealth app, patients should have the possibility to book a consultation, and clinicians, in turn, should have a calendar with upcoming appointments.
• Secure messaging. Telemedicine applications should also have chat functionality, allowing clinicians to monitor patients’ conditions after the consultation and allowing patients to ask questions about their treatment. 
• Integration with electronic health record (EHR) systems. If telemedicine software is integrated with the EHR system, healthcare practitioners can ensure the safe centralized storage of all patients’ electronic health records and easily access any patient’s data in real time during a telehealth visit.
• Payment management. Telemedicine systems can also include secure and reliable payment processing functionality, allowing patients to easily pay for online doctor visits.
• Integration with medical IoT devices. Thanks to such integration, clinicians can view patients’ vitals in real time during sessions or gather patients’ vitals over time to provide personalized treatment plans.
• Data analytics. To assist in clinical decision-making, telemedicine applications can include data analytics functionality so that clinicians can assess treatment progress over time and monitor the frequency and effectiveness of telehealth visits.

A holistic telehealth solution requires a substantial approach to developing a secure software architecture design and choosing the right technologies. We’ll share with you typical architectural approaches and technology options to choose from when beginning the development of a telehealth mobile app or web app. And based on our experience, we’ll also provide you with a few practical tips on successfully implementing telehealth software in your healthcare practice.

How we build a telehealth application architecture

Telecommunications technologies lie at the heart of any telemedicine app development solution that requires real-time videoconferencing between patients and clinicians. We often give preference to ready-made video and audio solutions such as Wowza, Flashphoner, and TokBox, as they save development time and often come with an established basic architecture. These services are also customizable to fit different projects’ needs.

Core aspects of telemedicine app architecture development

A telemedicine app’s architecture must also account for integrations with other software systems that are present at a certain healthcare facility, such as an electronic health record (EHR) system, hospital information system (HIS), practice management system, and medical imaging system. Proper software interoperability allows your telehealth solution to exchange data with other software solutions and keep everyone in the medical facility regularly updated on the daily workflow. Interoperability is also critical if you need to regularly perform analytics on patient and clinical data and track your business KPIs, such as average time per patient visit. 

When working on the architecture of telemedicine app development solutions, we also pay attention to industry-standard security measures, role-based access management, and data storage. These architectural components can differ depending on your requirements, but what’s constant is that we always choose only third-party development services (e.g. cloud vendors) that comply with relevant healthcare laws such as HIPAA as well as any other applicable compliance requirements.

If you want your telehealth system to integrate with medical IoT devices, we also make sure this integration is thought out and reflected in the architectural design. To make the most of this integration, you can include a remote patient monitoring module in your telehealth solution to collect patients’ clinical and fitness data for data-driven diagnostics and treatment management.

Best-fit technologies to develop a telemedicine app

To develop secure and high-performance telehealth products, we’ve accumulated a significant knowledge base and a list of the most suitable technologies. But we also try to keep up with industry trends as well as to enrich this knowledge base and provide up-to-date solutions to a wide range of healthcare businesses globally. 

For instance, to enable streamlined videoconferencing functionality and real-time connections, we implement a peer-to-peer network with the WebRTC protocol. For encrypting sensitive user data and passwords, we use the most recent security tools such as the SHA hashing algorithm. We also follow FHIR and HL7 interoperability standards for securely storing, sharing, and retrieving medical data. Our go-to cloud services provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS), as Amazon creates an extremely secure environment for hosting healthcare applications and ensures compliance with healthcare laws. 

Before developing a telemedicine app, we always validate with our clients the final architectural design of their future telehealth solution as well as the technology stack to keep them actively involved in the decision-making process. Discussing technology choices with business clients isn’t a common practice for the majority of outsourcing software development companies, but at Yalantis, we consider such discussions part of a transparent and trustworthy development process.

Tips for smooth telehealth platform implementation 

Once you go through the complete telehealth app development lifecycle with Yalantis, you may face certain challenges with implementing the new solution into your well-established healthcare practice. We’ve prepared a few tips that hopefully will help you streamline the use of your telemedicine platform across all of your healthcare facilities.

• Gather feedback from your clinical staff and conduct patient surveys. This will allow you to identify the issues your employees most frequently face so we can include features in your telehealth software that tackle real people’s daily pain points.
• Discuss your telemedicine app idea with key stakeholders. Make sure to involve all stakeholders within your healthcare organization in defining the goal behind implementing your telemedicine solution as well as the key features it should include.
• Select critical business KPIs to measure application performance. You should decide how you’ll measure the success of your new telehealth system so that together with other decision-makers at your company you can determine which KPIs are most important when it comes to telemedicine services.
• Identify possible risks. Before investing in telehealth application development, define possible risks that can keep you from achieving your goal within the desired time and budget constraints. Such risks can be of a legal, financial, social, or technological character.
• Set up training for medical staff and clear user onboarding for patients. Implementing new software may lead to frustration and increase anxiety among your employees. Interactive training sessions can help your staff quickly get used to the new workflow, and step-by-step user onboarding can facilitate the use of telehealth solutions among patients.

Telehealth app development involves many components, from defining a compelling implementation strategy to building a reliable telehealth solution with a well-designed architecture and a suitable technology stack that ensures a sufficient level of system security and sufficient protection of sensitive health data. The architecture of a telehealth application is of utmost importance. A proper architecture ensures timely system availability and responsiveness and other critical non-functional requirements for the telehealth platform. 

The future of telehealth software and how to remain competitive

Adoption of telehealth solutions is only growing, and many healthcare companies worldwide have started seeing the benefits of telehealth in the post-pandemic reality. Patients can receive quality care from the comfort of their home, and healthcare practices can reduce in-person visits and unburden clinical staff. These are some trends in the telehealth industry:

• Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms in a telemedicine app can assist clinicians in fast decision-making and in generating personalized educational content for patients who want to improve their lifestyles.
• Audience-centered UI/UX design is also a quickly proliferating trend, which means that telemedicine applications should be designed around the needs of a specific audience. For example, if your primary target audience is elderly people, you should focus on simple navigation, bright colors, and large buttons.
• A focus on mental health telehealth services is becoming widespread, as patients often find it intimidating to deal with their sensitive health issues at physical healthcare facilities, and it’s much more comfortable to get mental health support via a video call.
• The expansion of telehealth-specific hardware can significantly improve telehealth service delivery. For instance, AMD produces VersaScope multipurpose medical cameras that enable remote general purpose, dermatology, and otoscopy examinations. It’s a simple solution for creating digital images and performing accurate remote consultations.     

To build a telemedicine app that remains competitive for years, you should keep up with the latest technologies in the industry and stay in touch with your software users to make sure you meet their needs. And to efficiently manage telemedicine software development and avoid costly re-engineering down the line, you should find a trusted development team with a proven track record in healthcare development that can help you release your telehealth product quickly and with the least possible effort and cost.