With the growing telemedicine market and the statistical figures to support it, telemedicine applications have truly revolutionized healthcare. Across boundaries, doctors can now treat patients without regulations, rules, and hospital policies looming over their heads. The cost-effectiveness and competent management of time have also increased the popularity of such apps.
Imagine if you are working for the week and start to feel some pain in your abdomen or head during the weekend. Now in the normal scenario, you will have to wait till the weekend passes. But with these telemedicine platforms, you can now just open an app and consult a highly educated doctor without even going out. You will get a receipt online and can pay through online gateways meaning no need to go out.
Sounds interesting right? You can even build a telemedicine app yourself or hire an app developer to build one for you. Here are some of the features you need to keep in mind while building a telemedicine platform.
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Features to incorporate while building a telemedicine app which customers will love
Several features need to be integrated while thinking of how to develop a telemedicine app. These features vary and are essential to doctors and patients. Careful selection of features that will help the doctors gain access to patients and vice versa is crucial. Some of these features are given below.
1)User Profile Creation
The app should ask users to sign up on the platform and not just provide email, but also their phone number, gender, age, previous allergies, and diseases if any. Also, they can fill up their locality and previous medication they have gone through so that the doctor gets an idea about them.
2) Search with geolocation
This feature is essential for the patients to locate doctors in the near vicinity and make the subsequent appointment. The search options also allow the patients to look for specialists near their location. Add vital filters to the search bar to further aid the users. Make sure that your app complies with the medical rules by integrating Google Maps by a third-party API.
3) Uninterrupted communication
It is the most crucial feature that you need to focus on. Audio or video calls both need to be of high-quality and streamed without glitches or interruption. Doctors need to communicate clearly with the patients to avoid confusion and render the best treatment possible. The security in these modes of communication must be top-rated to keep the data safe.
Also, the patients should be given a choice to chose a doctor who can speak in the patient’s native language so that he can explain his condition in a much better way. This will increase the communication quality between the two.
4) Payment options
After the patient has obtained the doctor’s services, the payment options must pop up without delay. Make sure that you provide the users with more than one opportunity for convenience. It is also vital that these payments are made through secure mediums with no loss of money or information from the customers. The transaction history must be transparent to the customer.
5) Patients and doctors profiles
A high degree of security must be maintained while the patients develop their user profiles. These must be encrypted and only accessed by the doctor concerned upon receiving confirmation from the patient. The doctor’s profile must be filled with accurate information. Patients can opt to check out the doctor’s license number and the doctor’s credibility. Any fraudulent activity must be dealt with accordingly.
6) Analytics and additional integrations
The telemedicine app should store previous data of the patient. This way when the doctors treat the patient, he or she can check the reports from the app dashboard only and give the prescription based on previous reports and data. It would be a great feature as well if these telemedicine apps collaborate with different pharma labs in the locality that can come home to deliver the reports or medicines according to the prescription.
7) Notifications and reviews
Notification and regular reminders help the patients to remember their appointments if they have made any. It also allows them to make sure that they are free at the time of their appointment with their doctor.
Reviews and feedbacks from the previous patients are essential to ensure high-quality services from doctors. Comments and ratings are some of the ways that you can stimulate the user to provide valuable feedback.
8) Low Cost of Treatment
One feature that can gain more users to a telemedicine app is the lower cost of treatment than the conventional treatment where the patient has to go out and stand in queue for their number. These apps can give 10% or 20% off Coupon codes to the first time users and hence encourage them to use it.
9) Doctor’s Dashboard
These apps should have an advanced doctor’s dashboard where the doctor can view the patient’s medical history and the disease the patient is suffering from now. Also if they have used the app before and how have they corporated with previous doctors. After seeing all of this, a doctor can choose whether to accept this patient or not according to the time availability.
If the doctor accepts the patient, the doctor’s dashboard loads up with the patient’s previous reports and prescription making it more feasible for him to diagnose and give the treatment accordingly.
These are some of the features that you can implement while building a telemedicine application that will receive copious amounts of love and attention from the customers. After the app is built, you can have a survey from the existing users about the new features they would like on the platform and implement it.
It is important to note that the telemedicine market is here to stay and likely to bloom rapidly in the future with a sky-high revenue and increased customer satisfaction rate because people are more interested in good healthcare than ever before. Hence it is the right time to build a telemedicine app while the saturation is low.
References:
https://topflightapps.com/ideas/how-to-create-a-telehealth-app/