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After a bit of shuttling between work and home, you return to your sick baby who embraces you with a warm hug. Not once do they make you complain about your choices or schedule, for not being there with them for most of the day. Children getting sick is a nightmare scenario. There are obvious symptoms – raised temperature that won’t respond to treatment, persistent vomiting over 24 hours, being “off their food” that makes it essential to go to the doctor. But what about the coughs, the sniffles, the headaches, and the mystery that follows? It can be as difficult as it is essential to get it right – but there can be an added factor of an exaggeration! Cripes! How can you sit still in this bit? Immediate doctor consultation is required (someone who is available at that hour).
Purpose of Bringing Mobility in HealthCare
According to the Global Observatory for eHealth (GOe), mHealth is medical and public health practice supported by mobile devices. It is a subset of eHealth and is inclusive of patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other wireless devices. Mobile phones with all their utilities capitalize upon voice calls, short messaging service (SMS), mobile applications (apps), Internet, Global positioning system (GPS), Bluetooth Technology, etc.
Benefits of mHealth/eHealth Applications
Mobile health technologies enable doctor-patient communication and contribute significantly to patients’ health outcomes. Such doctor consultation through mobile health apps is convenient for the doctors and as well for the patients, as it saves time, money for both. But this approach has often been found to overcome widespread health system barriers, such as health professional shortages, reliance on untrained or/and informal medical service providers, cost of service, transportation, and lack of sources of reliable information.
A cross-sectional, observational and web-based study on mHealth Applications suggests that those applications that provide online doctor consultation or doctor appointment online doctor booking-related services do not relate to – Diet and fitness, Health information, Health insurance, Medicine order/information, health programme, Hospital/lab/clinic locator, and others unclassifiable. Practo, mfine, DocsApp, 1mg, Netmeds, Lybrate, MediBuddy, Ask Apollo, I Online Doctor, CallDoc, DOCTOR INSTA, DocOnline, and Medlife are amongst the selected mHealth apps operating in India, providing doctor consultation-related services online/offline.
- mfine, Practo, and Lybrate offer doctor consultation through audio, chat, and video call
- DocsApp and Netmeds offer doctor consultation through both chat and audio call
- 1mg offers free chat consultation
- MediBuddy and Medlife offer audio call consultation
AI in Healthcare
Artificial Intelligence and natural language programming help patients in finding doctors with an appropriate specialization without using medical jargon. It provides substantial improvements in all areas of healthcare from diagnostics to treatment.
AI assistants listen to patients’ breathing patterns, tones of voice, and background noises, during emergency calls to help diagnose heart attacks to allow 90% accuracy allowing them to help they need more quickly. More precisely these are capable of diagnosing symptoms for Breast cancer, Type Two Diabetes, Chronic Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and even Atrial fibrillation.
Google’s Deep Mind AI is currently able to analyze eye scans and diagnose over 50 conditions that threaten the health of the eye with the same accuracy as physicians. But because it’s automated, it can do it much faster and at a much higher scale fulfilling one of the main promises of data science.
Other more relevant use cases of artificial intelligence in medicine include Accelerated Drug Discovery, Medical Imaging Analysis, Medicine Cost Reduction, Mental Health Treatment, and Diagnosing Cancer More Accurately, precision medicine, ambient assisted living, and machine vision.
Challenges in Implementing Doctor Consultation App
The need, accessibility of mobile phones and the internet have significantly increased the usage of mHealth applications due to health literacy, and affordability. It sometimes becomes a challenge for families below the poverty line, where affording a mobile device is a task. But at other times those with the financial capacity to buy a smartphone lack health literacy to make full use of these mHealth apps, which determines healthcare utilization.
Notable Features in Doctor Appointment App
- Online and Offline Doctor Appointment Booking – To fully assist the patients and doctors in accessing the app as and when required.
- Administrator Profile/Panel – To enable administrators to manage doctors and patients
- Doctor Profile/Panel – It must contain every detail about the doctor’s professional status.
- Listings of doctors with search filters – To narrow down your search to find a specialist doctor.
- Patient Profiles/Panel – Personal details with medical history to assist doctors in treatment.
- Map Integration – To enable patients to visit hospitals without much trouble
- Reminders & Notifications –
- Online Video Conferencing Capacity –
- prescriptions Feature –
- Symptom Checker and Disease Diagnosis – It enables AI-based assistants to make predictions based on patients’ symptoms.
- eBilling & Payment Gateways – It handles online payments, feature secure payment gateways for the user to pay for their scheduled payments.
- Cost Calculator and Health Tracking –
- A Drug Reference Tool and Safety Compliance Information –
Technology Stack of eHealth Apps
| Front-end development | Angular, ReactJS |
|---|---|
| Back-end development | Node.js, PHP, Phyton; database – Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB |
| Mobile development | Android – Java, iOS – Swift |
| Multiple payment modes | Braintree, PayPal, Stripe |
| Map integration and user location tracking | Google Maps API, MapKit, CoreLocation |
| Push notifications | Push.io, Twilio |
| In-app calling and messaging | Twilio |
| Cloud environment | Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure |
Business Models
Doctor appointment applications charge a fee from care providers and remain free to patients. At times, they offer premium features upon subscription to patients, B2B telemedicine solutions to doctors and a couple of subscription-based products for employers and insurance companies. Another variant of eHealth applications works on a flat fee-based model in which patients pay a fixed fee per doctor consultation. All the variants remain true for Web and native mobile apps for iOS, iPad, and Android.
Doctor Appointment App Development Cost
A ready-to-use doctor appointment app will take around US $40,000-1,50,000.
Conclusive: The Way Forward
The process of healthcare infrastructure is costly and lengthy. As many people gain access to mobile phones, the mHealth platform offers a great purpose for healthcare services. Moreover, mHealth only requires awareness, minimal funding, and planning by the government. It minimizes travelling and time-related costs. This platform is used to raise the health literacy of the people to improve health-seeking behaviour. And medical professionals are reluctant to work in rural areas due to low living standards, limited learning opportunities, career growth, and earning opportunities in comparison to urban areas.
The doctor appointment app focuses on around-the-clock access to scheduling options. Such apps feature an extensive directory of available professionals, automatic reminders and integration with their digital calendars. It enables submitting any existing health-related documents before a consultation, and secure payments for patients. Consult development experts!