9 Essential Questions to Consider When Developing a Telemedicine Platform

Telemedicine and telehealth as a service are already becoming a norm in global healthcare. In the last 24 months, the adoption of telemedicine apps has gained a larger momentum as compared to legacy or traditional healthcare businesses. Mckinsey has already estimated that the telemedicine industry will have a global investment of $250 billion.

There is never a better time to launch and kickstart your own healthcare business in the telemedicine sector. However, you need to know all the essential steps before launching your telemedicine startup. The first step to launching a healthcare software or telemedicine app is to select the best telemedicine software development company.

In this article, we’ll cover what you should know before hiring telemedicine app development services for your telemedicine business. We focus on answering the commonly asked questions when entrepreneurs select the right healthcare development company.

#1. What are your business goals?

You must define your goals and objectives behind starting a telemedicine business. Document a list of short-term and long-term goals and write an objective against it with an estimated timeline and budget. The goals and objectives must be defined and fine-tuned keeping the latest market trends in mind.

Remember that local regulations and government policies play an important role in the healthcare business. The defined goals must adhere to the regulations and policies. You must define a goal related to benefits and profitability for your practice.

The benefit must be clearly defined and stated to all the stakeholders.

Let’s suppose you’re building a telemedicine platform for virtual doctor visits. The benefit can be to have a greater reach to remote areas, reduce costs, achieve flexibility, provide more specialized services and allow for virtual physician visits. The first step is to start with MVP development to test the ideal and user response.

Deciding on a type of telemedicine model is also important because you must decide whether your model is a patient-provider model, or a referral model based on store and forward. Note that your goals and objectives will vary based on the type of model.

Finally, you must get sign-off from all the stakeholders and have a weekly or monthly plan to review the goals and their progress to stay on track with your healthcare business.

Also Read : Launch your telehealth startup

#2. Plan your healthcare ROI from the very beginning

Without an ROI, it is not possible to maintain any business. You must have a monetization or ROI plan from the beginning before spending a single dollar on your healthcare venture.

You must write down your overheads, resources, infrastructure, equipment, and other costs and compare them with your budget. You need to have timelines to make it break even and enter profitability. If there is a plan to get investors, then ROI must be dependent on the success of the MVP vs expenditure. With an MVP, the costs may be less, and you can get genuine feedback also from the customers and stakeholders. You must factor in the number of patients coming per day and the number of providers required to handle the appointments.

As reimbursements are no longer an issue in the telemedicine business, you can plan ROI accordingly. As CMS has lifted the restriction to allow reimbursements for the telemedicine business since Covid-19, this is a great time to hire a telemedicine app development company for creating an app with ROI.

#3. Know the legal compliance and regulations

Your healthcare app must comply with legal and government regulations. Hire a legal expert and take a consultation on the legal policies and processes. The consultant will help you fine-tune the policies based on changing economic and political trends. Along with this, your business should be HIPAA and PHI compliant and should restrict data downloads and medical records transmission without proper permissions.

You must have agreements, certifications, and resource training as part of the legal and compliance segment. Your video and audio chats must be encrypted and should not allow recording or taking photos.

#4. Hire a credible telemedicine software development service provider

One way to assess if the company is experienced in telemedicine software development services is by viewing their portfolio. Are their projects functional with the right UX/UI features? Are the software they built HIPAA and PHI certified? Do they have the right telemedicine features like scheduling online calls, appointment booking, accepting online payments and more?

Telemedicine software development company Knovator Technology is one of the best healthcare development companies. We have a proven track record of building numerous telehealth, mhealth, remote patient monitoring, prior authorization and custom websites, apps and software under our belt.

The telemedicine software can be integrated with IoT, AI/ML and data analytics functions to provide a comprehensive picture of your user’s health.

Also Read : Healthcare Mobile App Development

#5. How do I improve my app?

The way to go about this is by taking feedback from users at every stage of the development. This ensures that the app has features the user expects.

Feedback could be in the form of calls, emails, or survey forms.

#6 How much time will my MVP take?

You need 5-8 weeks to launch an MVP app and a team of 5-6 developer resources to work on your requirements for better product delivery.

The project will be divided into phases of business analysis, design, development, testing, deployment, support, and maintenance and should plan for post-launch support also. Adopting the right UI/UX, and improving the product based on competitive analysis, feedback, and analytics can help you gain more ROI from MVP.

Hire a telemedicine app development solution to develop your healthcare website/app/software. As compared to a freelance developer, an agency has a team of resources including designers, business analysts, developers and testers to ensure that every phase of your development is smooth.

They’ll estimate a timeline based on the features and complexities.

#7. How many features should go in MVP?

You can have a patient, and physician module with basic text chat and a monetization feature to begin. It could be in the form of a website or mobile app. Registration, booking, appointment scheduling, and basic text chat are a must. If required, go for video chat at an extra price to provide more benefits.

#8. Should I go for custom telemedicine software?

Yes, because you will have more power over the code and functionality and can fine-tune to make your app unique. In the long run, it will save you costs, and you can start a white label business also for other locations.

Custom telemedicine software development company has several moving parts, right from assessing your requirements to building a wireframe, developing the platform, testing and quality assessment and lastly maintenance. An individual may specialize in one of the aspects, but a healthcare software development agency like Knovator Technologies manages your development end-to-end.

Also Read : Top Telehealth Business Ideas

#9 – Why should you build a telemedicine platform?

If you’re looking to digitize your healthcare business, building a telemedicine platform is a great start. It offers users the benefit of leveraging your services right from the comfort of their homes. Additionally, patients across geographies can get access to physicians and healthcare services on your telemedicine software platform.

Contact Knovator Technologies – your one-stop telemedicine software development company to ask more questions and get advice to build a great telemedicine app.