How to Create a Healthcare App Like Zocdoc?

To build an app like Zocdoc, you must know how the application became successful and a reliable platform for more than 6 million patients. The Zocdoc helps users connect with doctors easily through a visually appealing and user-friendly interface. It has a 4.4 rating on the Google Play store with 1 million+ app downloads, while holding the rank 19 in the medical section of the Apple app store with a 4.6 rating.

Similarly, many healthcare services are on the rise as patients prefer the convenience of remote healthcare and quick access to their physicians. The global revenue of the eHealth apps market is estimated to reach $3.00 billion by 2027. Keeping that in mind, you must focus your efforts on what makes current healthcare applications successful and what you can do better in your healthcare app.

9 Steps to Build an App Like Zocdoc

Essentially, hiring an experienced app development agency is the best approach for building any mobile app. They can plan, execute, and manage every development process from beginning to end.

Conduct Market Research

As mentioned above, you must understand what successful healthcare apps are doing well and what you can do better. You need to do some market research to gain such information. It can include research and evaluation of competitors, target users, and the changes in the healthcare app market revenue. It will help you create an effective strategy to build a healthcare app, ensuring it has every advantage required to succeed and survive in the market.

Determine a Niche

A healthcare app can be for appointment booking, fitness, nutrition, muscle growth, mental wellness, yoga, hospital operation management, patient records management, or an all-in-one healthcare solution platform. Choose a niche that has the potential for success and growth in the healthcare industry.

Choose the Platform

Are you building a native app for iOS and Android? Are you building a native app only for Android? Or are you building a cross-platform app? These are choices that depend on your business goals and affect the development timeline and budget.

Industry experts recommend cross-platform development especially if you are a startup. Cross-platform apps are easy to build and cost-effective while providing your healthcare platform access to a large user base. A cross-platform can be available on iOS, Android, Web, macOS, Windows, and more platforms if required, and at much lower costs than Native.

Talk to an experienced healthcare software development agency to get better insights about the app platform and type of development (Native or cross-platform).

Estimate the Development Cost

A standard healthcare app development cost can range from $25,000 to $45,000. However, the final cost depends on your business goals, number and type of features, app niche, platforms, app complexity, UI/UX design, and the location of developers.

Be that as it may, the table provides an average estimation of the development cost for your healthcare platform.

Choose the Tech Stack

Hiring experienced developers can help you choose the most ideal technology stack to build an app like Zocdoc. You need a tech stack to build everything from the front end, back end, and payment gateways to the database, location, and notifications in your app. The table below contains the common tech stack required for a healthcare app.

Your healthcare app may need less, more, or different technology based on the project requirements and business goals.

Create a User-friendly Design

The user interface and UX is the experience of your app that determines the ease of use and visual journey for target users. It is the primary element that determines user acquisition, retention, customer defection, and app uninstallation rate. Therefore, ensuring it meets or exceeds expectations/standards is crucial for the success of your healthcare app.

When it comes to healthcare, ease of use is always more important as users are more concerned about how easy it is to get what they need. For example, a patient would consider an app where he or she can quickly open the app (short loading time), find a doctor, connect with them, and get the direction to the clinic/hospital in seconds.

Improve App Security

The two app categories that require better security are fintech and healthcare applications. These apps contain much confidential information about organizations and users, which can cause many legal and personal issues if the information is stolen or leaked.

mHealth apps contain data like patient health records, addresses, contact (phone number and email), payment details, private conversations, and sensitive information about doctors, staff, or medical research.

Therefore, you must pay more attention to security measures like data encryption, biometric authentication, and Multi-factor authentication to secure your healthcare app. You can also hire app security experts to improve the overall security if the budget supports it.

The more security and privacy you provide in your healthcare app, the more patients, doctors, and healthcare institutions will use and rely on it.

Conduct Application Testing

To build a healthcare app (that provides better security/privacy and value to target users), you must conduct both automated and manual testing including penetration, functional, usability, speed, and user acceptance testing. Such testing will help you find any flaws in your app and deal with them before deployment. Penetration testing helps ensure better security, while user acceptance testing allows you to test the app UI and functionality from the perspective of end users.

Application testing should be a part of your development process from the beginning to ensure every element in the app meets expectations.

Provide App Maintenance

After deployment, you must provide regular maintenance for your app to ensure it runs smoothly without any bugs, errors, or crashes. Any problems with the functionality or unexpected downtimes/crashes can create a bad user experience and major emergency issues for healthcare app users. Therefore, providing app maintenance is a must-do step that you have to plan from the early days of app development.

Conclusion

With strategic research, planning, and management, you can build a healthcare app like Zocdoc with ease and under a specific project timeline. You should use Agile methodology for improving team productivity and accelerating development. The iterative and incremental approach of this methodology will help you ensure value and quality-driven development, leading to a high-performance and user-friendly healthcare application.