How to calculate healthcare app development cost and create a service that will use almost 5 million users

The need for quality medical services is growing every year, so that’s why the medical industry is attracting more and more money. People are concerned about their health, so they need convenient and effective tools to track their well-being and get quality treatment. With the advent of medical and health apps, people realized their importance, convenience and other benefits due to which the number of such products is increasing every year. Currently, there are more than 40,000 mobile healthcare apps on App Store and Google Play. Revenues from apps in healthcare look equally impressive: according to MarketsAndMarkets, by the end of 2023, the healthcare app market revenues will reach $120 billion, and by 2028 – $400 billion, and telemedicine alone will bring in about $18 billion in 2026.
Among all the varieties of software, healthcare software can be called one of the most important and most feature-rich apps in the market and they require a lot of time and resources. Moreover, the development of medical applications can be complicated for quite different reasons: handling sensitive data and related legal aspects, processing large volumes of complex medical data, as well as integrated work with complicated medical equipment. To sum up, there are many factors to consider when working with medical applications.
In this article, we talk about the healthcare industry and what prospects it has in terms of specialized software development, what medical and health applications can be, what they consist of, and how healthcare app development costs stack up.

Classifying healthcare applications

Health and medical applications can have a wide variety of functionality: fitness applications, nutrition monitoring programs, medical applications for clinics and hospitals, insurance companies require their own unique set of functions. In order to understand what such products may consist of, let us give a small classification of healthcare applications.

Health apps vs. medical apps

It's important to understand the differences between two large groups of healthcare applications: health apps and medical apps. They differ in almost everything from the user types to the data to work with. Let's take a closer look at each group.

Health Apps

Health applications are familiar to a large number of users because they are products that we use on a daily basis, such as tracking our physical activity, monitoring our diet, sleep, medications, and more.
These apps are designed for a wide audience, they are used not only by doctors, but also by ordinary users who are interested in maintaining aspects of health that do not require the intervention of physicians. Often, the development of such apps is cheaper, because they do not need to take into account the complex aspects of medical equipment, as they work mainly with the data received from wearable devices and IoT devices (e.g. fitness bracelets, smart watches, scales and other ones).

Medical Apps

Medical software and systems are designed for a narrower audience: doctors and medical staff at hospitals and clinics. These apps are not designed to work with data like sleep, sport or nutrition, but to analyze and perform diagnostics on more complex medical data obtained from electronic medical records or medical devices directly. With these products, doctors can store patient data, consult with their colleagues and share insights to make more accurate diagnoses and prescribe more effective treatments.
These applications have higher data security requirements than health applications, set by IT standards and country laws, and require more sophisticated functionality, which can make medical app development cost significantly higher.

Types of apps in healthcare and their functionality

There are many types of health and medical apps and each of them has its own set of features, but the following features are present in almost all types of apps:

• Registration and authorization. To get access to all the necessary tools and services of a healthcare product, users need to register there. It is useful to implement registration and authorization using profiles in social networks (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) or other services (Google, Apple ID), but this will be a good solution only in health tracking apps, where the security level allows the implementation of such technologies.
• User Profile. In the user profile, people are asked to enter all the necessary information about themselves and their medical documents that are required for health services. Dashboards can also be included in this section to display all the necessary information about the patient's health, test results and history of doctor visits and much more.
• Search within the application/service. Medical and health apps may provide a large number of services, and these services may also be provided by many doctors and medical staff. In order to find a service or doctor within the system, you need to use the search bar.
• Chatbox. Sometimes it is more convenient and faster to use text chat than video tools to communicate with a specialist, because this is how you can report any quick changes in your health or other problems. And if your app offers services for tracking your health without a doctor's intervention, the chat will help you to quickly contact the support team if any disputable and problematic situations arise.
• Notifications. Depending on your app type, notifications will promptly inform you about certain events, for example, a reminder of an upcoming doctor's appointment, ready results of a medical check-up, a specialist's response in chat or a payment check for services rendered.
• Making payments. Built-in payment tools will help your users to pay for services without leaving the app.
  

How much does it cost to develop basic functions of the application? We would like to remind you that the estimated costs written below are approximate, and the exact cost will depend on many factors, such as the complexity of the functionality in the application. Basic healthcare app functionality can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $45,000 USD in total.
Now that we explored the basic features that may be present in one way or another in all healthcare apps, we can move directly to the individual types of apps and the functionality that may be present in them, and consider how much it may cost to develop such apps.

Electronic medical/health records (EMR/EHR)

Electronic medical records systems are also called medical database applications, and it is, because its main function is to collect, store, update and transfer digital patient information between the staff of a medical institution or several hospitals and clinics. In essence, they act like repositories for paper medical records, only in a more modern form that is convenient for medical staff to work with.
EHR systems can range from basic functions to more complex and sophisticated systems. It just depends on your requirements, budget and target audience. Here's what functionality electronic health record systems can contain:

• Tools for managing patient medical data to enter, edit, delete information about diseases, prescribed treatment and contraindications;
• Ability for physician decision-making on treatment prescription and subsequent notification of the patient.
• Infrastructure for electronic patient records, for convenient display of information and visualization of diagnostic results;
• Writing and sending electronic prescriptions for medications (e-Prescribing or eRx) to provide effective and accurate treatment to patients without the need to visit the clinic;
• Integration of work with medical equipment for visualization and analysis of examination results.
  

Just above we wrote that EHR systems can be either simple or multifunctional, and development costs can range from $25,000 to $50,000 USD for a simple product to $80,000 to $400,000 USD for a complex and multifunctional system.

Telemedicine applications

Telemedicine allows patients to receive medical consultations via remote communication, receive treatment and prescriptions for medicines, and some products also allow patients to order prescribed medicines at home. This has become an excellent solution for patients with low mobility who cannot receive medical care in person at the hospital, as well as for people who live in remote settlements and villages and are unable to travel to medical facilities. Telemedicine became mainstream during the COVID-19 pandemic, when face-to-face visit to a doctor was limited for almost everyone, and thus became a mainstay in the string of digital health services.
Looking at this software in detail, there are several major features that can be present in telemedicine applications:

• Features for video conferencing and text chats for remote patient and doctor consultations;
• A catalog of doctors users can have consultations with and receive further treatment from.
• Scheduling and pre-booking of medical appointments;
• Tools for working with prescriptions and the ability to order the delivery of medications using them.
  

Telemedicine applications sometimes include functionality of other types of medical applications, for example, EHR, and the cost of development directly depends on the functionality that the application contains. That’s why, according to various estimates, the development cost will range from $30,000 to $250,000 USD.

Systems for remote diagnostics and health monitoring

Remote health monitoring systems collect and transmit information from various medical devices: sensors and body-worn devices, but also wearable devices such as smart watches and fitness bracelets that can also read information about the user's heart function and physical activity. All this allows remote diagnostics to select an effective treatment and get it done on time.
Diagnostic apps include some telemedicine features such as messaging chats and video calling tools, and the following features should also be there:

• Secure storage and transmission of sensitive medical data as these are systems that are primarily designed to prescribe treatment to patients, i.e. it is a medical app and not a health app;
• Ability to monitor patient health indicators that are tied to the performance of specific medical devices and sensors;
• Prescribing treatment and notifying the patient about it, as well as alerting them to irregularities and found diseases as a result of analyzing data from medical devices.
  

Since remote monitoring and diagnosis systems are complex medical applications, their cost will vary greatly with the functionality being implemented. Thus, it ranges from $40,000 to $450,000 USD per development.

Mental health apps

Monitoring your mental health has become just as important as monitoring your physical health. Recently, this type of application has become a truly multifunctional system, with all sorts of formats for users to interact with specialists, tips for self-monitoring and much more.
Mental health apps contain the functionality of telemedicine and health monitoring products to conduct remote consultations with psychologists, monitor patient’s emotional state and record behavioral peculiarities, mood swings and possible causes of these events. Such applications also include guides and exercises for relaxation and stress relief, and contain information about psychological health that can be studied and used to improve one's own condition.
Since mental health apps contain a large number of complex features, the cost of creating them can range from $50,000 to $200,000 USD.

Fitness and nutrition apps

Fitness and nutrition apps are probably the best known health monitoring apps. More than 380 million people use them, and the number is only growing every year. While a couple of years ago the rise in popularity of fitness apps was influenced by COVID-19, now the fashion for digital fitness is growing due to social influence.
Fitness apps are primarily focused on physical activity tracking which uses user data such as height and weight, heart rate information, location and many other data to calculate some sort of workout information such as calories spent. In addition to physical activity, sometimes these apps are paired with other functionality that determines how active the user is during the day or how well they rest, eat and sleep. After all, for fitness to change, you need to combine physical activity with a balanced diet, adequate rest and good sleep. All of this can be tracked by wearable devices in a single app or a single ecosystem of apps, each responsible for a different function.
To summarize, a fitness app as a health tracking app can include the following functionality:

• Activity tracker and calorie counter;
• Workout programs and meal plans;
• Dashboards with conveniently presented workout and nutrition information, as well as analytical tools to help users understand what to do next;
• Work with data from wearable devices.
• If you want to create a multi-disciplinary health app, you can include a sleep tracker and meditation plans in the functionality.
  

We envisioned the fitness app as a complex multifunctional system that includes everything related to non-medical health: exercise, nutrition, and sleep. Development of each of these modules, according to different estimates, can cost from $20,000 to $60,000 USD depending on the level of development of the application and its functionality. Thus, the cost of developing the entire multidisciplinary system can reach $180,000 USD.

Healthcare app development cost: summary

In the last section, we introduced several types of healthcare applications and provided rough estimates of health & healthcare app development cost. Why do we have such a large variation and what does the health and medical app development cost consist of? There are several important factors:

• First of all, the cost depends on the development process itself. In general terms, healthcare software development is not very different from, for example, developing a social network or ride-sharing app:

Each of these stages can be both simple and complex, and the more complex and versatile you need the interface, the more complex functions you need in the application, the longer and, as a result, more expensive it will take to create the product.

• Secondly, the cost is affected by time and human resources. Here the laws are simple:
  
  1. If you need to develop an app with high quality and in a short time, you need a large team of developers to realize it, and accordingly, more money.
  2. If you want to develop an application with a lot of complex functionality, you need unique specialists who understand the peculiarities of, for example, medical data, equipment operation or algorithms for analyzing medical information, then hiring such employees may be more expensive.
  3. If you want to create a medical app for doctors, you need to be sure to take into account all security standards and requirements of legislations related to personal data security when creating it. This requires a large time resource and deployment of the necessary infrastructure, and, as a consequence, large monetary investments.
• Thirdly, the cost is affected by the developer's hourly rate. It is known that hiring full-time developers is significantly more expensive than hiring a remote team. For example, in the USA the average hourly rate of a developer varies from $90 to $150 USD, and in Western Europe and Great Britain - from $80 to $120 USD. At the same time, a developer from Eastern Europe on average receives from $40 to $60 USD per hour, and in South Asian countries - from $25 to $50 USD. The optimal solution is to hire developers from Eastern Europe, as they are prepared for business processes in companies, have an excellent command of English and possess high technical competencies.

Conclusion

Medical and health apps are becoming more and more popular because it is a convenient and efficient way to get medical services and qualified treatment. Moreover, such apps make medicine more accessible for those who cannot reach a hospital due to physical and geographical reasons.
Ideas for a healthcare application can be quite different, but it is important to think through your solutions properly, analyze the target audience and what functionality they may need, and this will determine the time of product development and, as a result, its final cost, which is calculated by a simple formula, as for any other application: the number of hours spent on development multiplied by the developer's hourly rate.
Our developers know firsthand what healthcare application development is like. In particular, we are developing an application for a healthcare startup, where you can monitor your health, share information about your condition and receive medical recommendations from doctors. As a result of our work, we have accelerated the app and, over the last year, the number of its users has grown by about 15,000 people. So if you have an idea and a concept of your future healthcare application and want to hire high quality developers for its implementation or you don’t know how to develop a healthcare app, then feel free to fill out the form on our website and we will answer all your questions, discuss further work and provide an estimate of your project development time.