Digital Health App Development: Best Practices

More and more healthcare consumers see their smartphones as a portal to connect with their doctors and coverage providers.

They use their phones to order prescription refills, view and pay healthcare bills, and keep an eye on their health conditions.

According to Statista, 43% of Americans use healthcare apps. As of Q2 of 2024, there were 35,019 healthcare and medical apps available on the Apple App Store and 36,260 on the Google Play Store.

Whether you’re involved in medical app development, digital health app development, or general healthcare app design, developing these apps requires meticulous attention to detail, compliance with stringent regulations, and a deep understanding of user needs.

This article examines some common practices in healthcare software development that can help you achieve a high-quality health app.

Define Your Audience and Goals

The first step in developing a successful healthcare app is to find a problem worth solving.

There are thousands of health apps on the market, and they all solve some specific problem for their users. What makes yours different? You probably have an idea of a problem, but is it one people will pay money to solve?

The first step in determining this involves clearly defining your target audience. Identify the specific needs of your users, whether they are patients, healthcare providers, or administrative staff. Establish a user persona that includes relevant details about their preferred device screen resolutions, language, literacy level, and cultural background.

Next, determine the key features and functionality your app will need to solve the problem. This could range from tracking hospital inventory to managing patients’ records or providing telemedicine services.

After that, research existing solutions and competitors. Analyze existing products to ensure your app offers unique value or improvements over what is already available.

Ensure Compliance and Security

Healthcare apps handle sensitive patient data, making compliance with regulatory standards paramount. These standards (like most federal regulations) are designed to ensure your app is secure, accessible, and safe.

At a minimum, ensure that your app adheres to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines, which dictate how protected health information (PHI) should be handled. This includes encrypting data in transit and at rest, secure login processes, and robust data encryption.

Educate yourself about other relevant standards such as ISO 27001, IEC 62304, SOC2 Type 2, and the HITECH Act. For medical device apps, compliance with FDA regulations is also necessary. If you are not intimately familiar with these standards, consider engaging a healthcare software development consultant.

When integrating with services like Google Fit, HealthKit, or Samsung Health, ensure that APIs are integrated securely to protect user data. Your app is only as secure as its weakest link.

Design for User Experience (UX) and Usability

Your app may solve a critical problem, but if users find it confusing or difficult, they may find some other workaround. A well-designed user interface, therefore, is critical for user engagement and effectiveness.

Ensure the app is easy to navigate with clear, intuitive navigation and a well-designed interface. An intuitive interface helps increase patient engagement and ensures users can access the information they need quickly.

Design the app to be accessible to users with different levels of ability, incorporating assistive technologies for visual or hearing impairments.

Develop Core Features and Functionality

Align your healthcare app’s core features with its primary goals to ensure it provides real value to users.

For example, if your app includes patient and doctor profiles, organize app data into user profiles that patients and doctors can edit. Doctor profiles should include sufficient information to help patients make informed choices. Patient profiles should include the relevant PHI to help healthcare workers quickly and efficiently provide quality care.

Ensure the app integrates seamlessly with electronic health record (EHR) systems, appointment scheduling systems, and other healthcare software relevant to the problem you’re solving.

Follow Agile and CI/CD Methodologies

Agile development, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), are highly effective methods for healthcare app development.

Agile involves the use of brief, one-week sprints to develop and test features efficiently. This approach allows for quicker iteration and adjustment based on feedback.

CI/CD establishes an environment where QA engineers can test completed features without interfering with ongoing development. This ensures that the app is continuously improved and updated.

If these methods are unfamiliar, you may want to consider partnering with a healthcare software development company.

Conduct Thorough Testing and Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a critical aspect of healthcare app design and development. At a minimum, your QA process should include the following tests:

• Unit and System Tests: Conduct comprehensive unit and system tests to ensure the app functions as intended.
• User Acceptance Testing: Perform user acceptance testing to validate that the app meets user requirements and is free from major bugs.
• Performance Testing: Conduct performance testing to ensure the app can handle the expected user load without compromising performance.
• Code Reviews and Automated Tests: Implement regular code reviews and automated tests to maintain high code quality and catch issues early.

Launch and Maintain the App

The launch of the app may feel like you’ve accomplished your mission, but it doesn’t end there. Ongoing maintenance and updates are essential to keep the app stable and secure. As new devices or OS updates hit the market, you may need to adapt your application to work with their new features and technologies.

Make sure someone on your team is familiar with the requirements for inclusion in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. You have to jump through the right hoops to get your app approved, and it can sometimes take months to get in.

Once the app is launched, use analytics to gather feedback and understand user behavior. This data can be used to make necessary updates and improvements. It’s especially useful in determining why users abandon the app if you experience a high churn rate.

And keep an eye out for opportunities to add new features and improvements. Maybe your smartphone app can expand to additional platforms, such as smartwatches or browser-based dashboards, to reach a broader audience.

Best Practices Summary

At Taazaa, we utilize a few best practices for digital health app development that ensure every application we create meets the client’s needs. We focus on security, quality, and providing value.

One practice we find valuable is ensuring the app has a clear, single-focused purpose. This helps avoid complexity and helps ensure user engagement.

Interoperability is a core initiative in the healthcare sector. It helps ensure patient information is readily available across providers so quality care can be delivered wherever a patient needs it. Therefore, medical app development should integrate with existing healthcare systems to streamline care and ensure data accuracy.

When determining the feature set, prioritize core features that provide real value to users. Don’t overload the app with so many “nice to have” features that it can’t perform its core functionality well.

We can’t emphasize security enough when it comes to healthcare app design. Health apps and providers are hackers’ favorite targets. Implement robust cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive user data—and your business. The cost of a data breach can be astronomical.

Finally, healthcare app development experience is vital. Make sure your core development team includes people who have built health apps before. There are many unique intricacies to building apps for the healthcare industry, and having this knowledge in-house will help ensure the app meets clinical standards, user needs, and regulatory compliance.

Contribute Positively

By following these best practices, you stand a better chance of creating a healthcare application that not only conforms to regulatory standards but is also highly effective, user-friendly, and secure.

This approach ensures that digital health app development contributes positively to the healthcare ecosystem, improving patient outcomes and enhancing the overall quality of care.

If you need help bringing your healthcare app idea to life, consider partnering with Taazaa. We have a wealth of experience as a digital health app development company, and we’d love to put it to work for you. Check out our Success Stories for examples of our work.