Custom mHealth App Development: The Complete Guide

Bespoke mHealth app development refers to the process of developing and designing a healthcare mobile app in alignment with the specific needs of healthcare professionals, organizations, or patients.

The apps supplement the digital health solution by making health information available in a secure manner, enabling remote consultations, and promoting the activation of the patients. A custom-built mHealth app ensures compliance with healthcare laws and offers ease of use through efficient healthcare delivery.

The advantages of mHealth app development solutions and its versatility in all medical fields may substantially help both doctors and patients. It will be especially useful for patients who have chronic diseases, and it is necessary to monitor health conditions and have permanent control.

An opportunity to get a consultation online and a quick connection with a doctor remotely help your patients reduce the number of personal appointments. Besides that, people far from healthcare establishments can also get remote medical services. And it becomes very popular: according to Grandview Research, the global mHealth market size was $62.7 billion in 2023 and is forecast to reach more at a CAGR of 14.1% from 2024 to 2030.

Due to such a potential, the mHealth industry is changing healthcare services drastically and increasing the efficiency of medical care worldwide. The demand for mobile devices may provide a stable growth of high-tech manufacturing worldwide.

Today, mHealth app developers are actively implementing the latest trends in mobile medicine. Therefore, we have collected the most promising ones so that you can consider them when creating your healthcare solution:

• Digital prescriptions: mHealth solutions can provide electronic prescription services, making it easier for patients to pick up medication without visiting a doctor’s office.
• Virtual patient monitoring: Using IoT-enabled software, the physicians monitor key health parameters such as blood sugar levels and heart rate in real time. Integration with medical image analysis software solutions improves diagnosis and treatment planning.
• Gamification: mHealth applications add features such as medical training video games, emotional support systems, and fitness challenges.
• Mobile telemedicine solutions: They allow doctors and patients to connect over the device without needless fuss and effort.
• Custom mHealth apps: These solutions provide personalized health plans, medication reminders, and appointments, leading to a more personalized patient experience.

Mobile health is actively developing today, introducing the latest digital trends, which allows this sphere to be efficiently digitalized and improved. In addition to trends in service provision, mHealth app development services include creating solutions based on the most popular technologies, such as Blockchain or the Internet of Things. Moreover, combining mHealth with software development for medical devices allows to significantly improve diagnostics and treatment planning.

Before diving into the details of custom mHealth app development, it's crucial to determine what healthcare solutions exist. In general, mHealth software falls into the following types.

mHealth for patients

Among the applications for patients, there are the following main solutions to ensure quality medical services and improve overall healthcare efficiency:

• Health and wellness apps. Health and wellness apps help users improve their well-being through small daily steps. They include mental health tools, meditation guides, self-monitoring for critical indicators, and many more.
• E-prescription management apps. E-prescription apps allow doctors, pharmacists, and other medical professionals to fill and submit digital prescriptions.
• Chronic disease management apps. These applications greatly simplify the provision of systematic care by allowing doctors to monitor the status of chronically ill patients online.
• Telemedicine apps. Telemedicine software development is a great way to receive and provide healthcare services online. They allow doctors to monitor, assess, diagnose, and consult patients even if they are not located in a medical organization.

A great example of telemedicine applications is patient portals. They allow the therapist immediate access to all patient health data while providing secure storage.

mHealth for providers

m-Health app development for healthcare providers allows to significantly increase medical operations efficiency through such solutions:

• Electronic Health Record (EHR) apps. EHR shows full information about patients, and physicians can monitor the history of diseases, set reminders, communicate with patients, and more, making it essential to understand how to build EHR effectively.
• Remote patient monitoring. These applications, often combined with various wearables, allow for tracking and analyzing patients’ health conditions.
• Health insurance app. This software allows patients to find a doctor according to their insurance, receive important checkup reminders, fill out waiting room forms online, and book appointments.
• Hospital Information Systems. This system allows you to automate the workflow for medical institutions, combining a medical decision support system, electronic medical records, etc.
• Appointment management app. Such systems allow you to schedule and manage appointments, provide convenient scheduling, and reminders of upcoming meetings.
• Medical reference apps. These applications are extensive databases containing the necessary information about the drugs, treatment approaches, medical calculators, etc.

mHealth apps development has many benefits for both healthcare providers and patients. Let's get acquainted with them to get a complete picture of all the advantages of mobile medicine.

Technology is redefining healthcare, making services more accessible and efficient than ever before. Mobile app development plays a crucial role in simplifying healthcare management for both patients and caregivers.

Patients no longer need to visit a doctor's office for every consultation. Telemedicine applications connect them to healthcare professionals through secure video conferencing and messaging. This reduces wait times, minimizes costs, and enhances access to specialists.

Caregivers also benefit by receiving professional guidance remotely, saving time and effort. Custom mHealth app development ensures timely assistance for users managing chronic conditions or recovering from surgery.

For effective treatment, doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies must share medical data in real-time. Mobile healthcare app solutions facilitate secure and seamless information exchange among healthcare providers. Patients can access their medical history, prescriptions, and test results in a single platform, improving treatment accuracy and eliminating paperwork. Caregivers also stay updated on medication schedules and upcoming appointments, ensuring better healthcare management.

A quick and accurate diagnosis can be life-saving. AI-powered tools enable mobile app developers rendering healthcare mobile app development services to create applications that analyze symptoms and suggest potential conditions. So, m-health app development assists doctors in making faster, more informed decisions. Patients receive alerts if their symptoms indicate a serious issue, reducing the chances of human error and ensuring timely medical attention when needed.

Storing medical data in a centralized location simplifies healthcare management. For this, you can develop a healthcare app to keep health records secure and easily accessible. Digital records prevent the loss or misplacement of critical information. Patients and caregivers can access test results, vaccination history, and treatment plans anytime, facilitating seamless collaboration between doctors, caregivers, and family members.

Mobile technology continues to revolutionize healthcare in every aspect. From health monitoring to secure data sharing, modern mHealth app development solutions enhance convenience and improve patient outcomes. The next section will explore how innovations in application design further enhance healthcare delivery.

There are many ways in which mHealth app development can be used. It depends on the app’s purpose. Let’s review a few use cases that will completely change patients' experience and improve your workflow.

Patient portal development will allow patients to check their health reports. Portals make it possible for patients to connect with their family physician, schedule an appointment, set up reminders about specific medicines taking, and so on.

Patient portals also help patients become more responsible for their health and focus on the treatment process more attentively, letting them engage more in this process. Besides that, it allows doctors to increase patient care quality.

As healthcare industry moves forward, we need tools that allow physicians to operate on medical knowledge without wasting time with paper charts. Medical mobile apps allow patient charting to become range-free. Investment to healthcare application development may provide doctors with an easily manageable system where they can update records quickly. The custom healthcare applications built by respectable healthcare IT vendors help improve administrative tasks while also increasing patient retention.

E-prescription is another way to make patients feel comfortable; physicians can also reduce their stress. When patients need electronic prescriptions, they need it to be done fast. That is why mHealth apps should be used to achieve it. Physicians use a mobile app like an EHR system to indicate what medicines a patient needs to take and prescribe everything from anywhere in the world.

After e-prescription is done, physicians can send it to drug stores, or this process can be adjusted to send all prescriptions automatically, if a patient goes to the same drug store permanently. Patient care quality is growing exponentially.

Additionally, physicians can track how properly patients take drugs and remind them to take them if they forget or ignore them. However, most mHealth apps have integrated reminder features.

AI revolutionizes the way in which healthcare professionals analyze and evaluate health data. AI tools integrated within the app detect patterns, predict diseases and help in early diagnosis. This allows for better decision making and improved patient care. Healthcare apps development services provide an analytics solution that quickly processes millions of medical records with accuracy.

By custom development, healthcare providers can build AI features to meet their specific needs for better efficiency. AI also enables monitoring of a patient’s health status in real time, allowing for timely interventions. With further mHealth app development advancements, AI analytics will remain one of the tools for improving the mHealth system. AI development services play a crucial role in enhancing these capabilities, ensuring more sophisticated and efficient healthcare solutions.

The list of use cases may be extended, and there are many ways to use mHealth apps. But you should also know some pitfalls before you start mHealth app development.

Now that you have learned about mobile medicine's types, benefits and use cases, let's dive deeper into the custom mHealth app development process

First, you need to define the fundamental idea of your app. Consider what problem it should solve: providing telemedicine services, automating internal processes, or maybe it will be an app for health and wellness. Determining what goals you want to achieve with your medical solution is also important.

Once you have decided on the idea, move on to choosing a reliable technical partner. The most cost-effective option today is outsourced mHealth application development. This will allow you to reduce the time and cost of finding and maintaining an in-house team and speed up the time-to-market.

When looking for a mHealth app development company, you should focus on their expertise in mobile development and experience in the healthcare domain. Also, pay attention to customer reviews on platforms like Clutch and GoodFirms and vendors' portfolios. Finally, when selecting a region for cooperation, consider the number of IT companies and experienced specialists and the average hourly rate in the region. One of the top areas for outsourcing today is Central and Northern Europe, notably Estonia. This region provides a wide choice of experienced tech specialists, as well as relatively low prices, thanks to low taxes and high state support of the IT sector.

View our client, Breanne Butler, talking about cooperation with the Cleveroad healthcare software development team.

After you get in touch with the chosen software provider, the manager will set an appointment with the solution design team. The specialists will discuss the project with you and detail the requirements, defining the business goals, the scope of work, basic quality attributes, and key concerns. Based on this data, the team will provide you with a rough estimate and form a proposal.

Note: We at Cleveroad provide a Free Solution Design Workshop to align your healthcare needs with proper technical implementation via mHealth application development.

The team transforms all previously collected requirements into a detailed development plan in this phase. The specialists will discuss which platforms you want to cover, create an exhaustive list of features, and think through the application's architecture.

Also, the custom mHealth app development services include determining the functionality needed to implement your chosen monetization model. At the Discovery stage the team also defines all the necessary data security measures and compliance with industry regulations.

mHealth application development requires a special approach to UI/UX design. The most important thing is that it should be simple and easy to understand for every user. Experienced designers create several prototypes so that you can choose the one you like best. After that, they carefully build the design of the future application screen by screen. After your confirmation, the finished wireframes and mockups proceed to development.

After the team completes all the preparatory processes, mHealth app developers create your app. Development takes place in several sprints, during which specific features are built. A quality assurance accompanies each stage of development. Also, after the m-health app development, QA engineers perform several tests to ensure that everything works as it should and fix the bugs. Once the app is completed, the team launches it on the app stores and helps implement it into your operations.

You can start with building Minimum Viable Product (MVP), an app version with a basic set of features, to reduce the initial investment and time-to-market. Then, once it is up and running and you have collected your first feedback and gotten your first profit, you can start building a more feature-rich app.

Once your app is up and running and you've started delivering mobile health services — it's worth continuing to work with your chosen software vendor. mHealth app developers will help you to update the app for new OS versions, fix possible bugs, and add new features to attract more users.

The Cleveroad team designed a demo version of the Telemedicine platform, so you can see how the mHealth app can look and feel on the example of patient-side and provider-side solutions.

Let’s review the main pitfalls you should never avoid if you want to succeed and provide patients with a high-tech and reliable mHealth app.

It is very important to protect all data during mHealth app development since these apps contain a lot of personal information. That is why you need to follow the confidentiality policy and secure all data properly. If you build an app for the USA, you should make your app HIPAA-compliant. It means the app should meet all HIPAA regulations. If an app is built for EU-based citizens, then make sure that it is GDPR-compliant. Also, patients should know their personal data is protected and they can remove all their data if they think it necessary. In addition, patients need to approve that the app uses their data on their consent.

Getting approval from authorized regulatory bodies for your mHealth app is recommended. The problem is that many apps were unavailable in beta testing, and potential patients didn’t test it, and they didn’t get any approvals from the Ministry of Health or FDA (if the app is targeted at US citizens). That is why you should provide an app for consideration of such organizations, get their approval that your app meets all regulations, and then you can release it for public use.

Healthcare software can be exposed to a number of attacks, including phishing, man-in-the-middle, and network attacks. To protect yourself, it is worth taking specific safety measures aimed at providing increased security:

• Staff training. Train your employees to recognize phishing emails, create regular data backups, and adhere to basic security principles, such as creating strong passwords and avoiding suspicious links.
• Data usage controls. You need to keep track of all activities done with the files. To protect them, you use data logging to identify unauthorized actions quickly, enforce strict access rights, use advanced cryptography for data encryption during transmission and storage.
• Monitoring attached devices. To protect the data, it is crucial to create a separate network for IoMT devices and monitor any changes in activity.

Various wearable devices have been used for mhealth app development for many years, as they allow for a significant improvement in the delivery of healthcare services. For example, fitness trackers are often integrated with fitness and mentoring apps because they track the number of calories burned and remind users to engage in physical activity or eat a meal. In addition, more sophisticated devices, such as blood pressure and ECG monitors, are integrated with remote patient monitoring platforms or telemedicine applications.

At Cleveroad, we had experience creating a telecare solution connected with an IoT hydration sensor. Our customer wanted to develop a mobile app for tracking hydration indicators received from the IoT sensor integrated with their PaaS platform. So, we created a cross-platform application connected with an IoT hydration sensor and a web-based Admin panel covering users' registration, activation, and management to achieve the customer's goals.

• Explore our IoT-Based System of Hydration Monitoring case in more detail

And the last but not the least thing to consider after custom mHealth app development is an application performance testing. To ensure accessibility and reliability of the app, you should perform load testing (actually, the custom healthcare software development company will need to do it). If you tell them that you want to put a product on the market as soon as possible, and you ask them to skip the testing phase, your app is under risk. It should undergo all testing phases to make sure it will function properly under various circumstances.

Make sure that various mobile OS versions will support your app since somebody uses a 18-iOS-based iPhone, and somebody still uses iOS 12. The same concerns Android OS versions. Don’t ignore crash monitoring - it will provide your users with an uninterrupted experience. Thorough quality assessment of mHealth apps guarantees that your application meets industry standards, ensuring security, usability, and overall performance for end users.

And, finally, mind adding a notification about mobile connection. That is, if a patient needs to watch a video but a mobile device isn’t connected to a Wi-Fi network, they should get a notification that connection will be performed via a 3G or 4G network, and it may cost a penny for a user.

The cost of mHealth app development services can range from $75,000 to $200,000+. However, the price will be higher if you want to implement the latest technological trends, such as AI, ML, IoT, and blockchain technology. You may wonder why we only provide a cost range. The answer to this question is straightforward: the price of custom mHealth app development depends on many factors, so the software vendor needs to analyze your requirements for the product before giving a more accurate estimate for your project.

Factors that influence the cost of the mobile health application development include (but it’s not limited to them):

• Number and complexity of features. The more feature-rich and complex your application is, the more time it will take to create it, affecting the final cost.
• Technology. More complex technologies require more developer time and expertise, increasing the mHealth project price.
• A number of platforms. Depending on whether you're creating your app for just one platform (iOS or Android) or two at once, the cost of the app will also change. However, cross-platform Flutter app development services can help you cut costs (by 40%) if you want to cover both platforms.
• Vendor’s hourly rate. The final cost will also change depending on the hourly rate in the region you choose to collaborate with.

Note: To plan your budget, you can get acquainted with the telemedicine app development cost details in our full guide.

We already had an experience in the mHealth application development for different purposes and we would like to share it with you. Unfortunately, since all apps are created under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), we won’t indicate its title. But we'll gladly tell you more about their peculiarities and functionality.

Our client is a US-based manufacturer that provides medical practitioners with IoT devices for ECG heart monitoring and pulse oximeters to check blood oxygen levels. The company wanted to create an IoT system for hydration monitoring in real-time allowing end users to evaluate ECG and check oxygen concentration in their blood from mobile devices. The client also wanted to develop functionality for a website that would enable selling the solution online and establish a social, professional community.

To accomplish this task, the Cleveroad team created mobile apps for iOS and Android and configured their connection to the client's devices using Bluetooth. Moreover, apps fully meet the 510(k) FDA Medical Device Registration requirements and are HIPAA compliant. We also created an e-commerce module on the company's website and a WordPress-based forum integrated with mobile apps.

As a result, the customer got a mobile telecare app that meets US health regulators' requirements and is in demand among users: 95% of users' reviews rate it with "4-5 stars". The app also receives positive feedback from doctors. Thanks to the e-commerce module, the customer opened up a new value stream, and with the help of the forum, the customer has already built a large community, increasing trust in the company and its products.

The other company we work for is the Nedley Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program, developed by Dr. Nedley (internal medicine specialist). Our client wanted to create a unique RPM solution for behavioral health support to help people to fight depressive disorders and work on their mental and general health conditions.

To meet the client's goals, we developed an application to work with Nedley Depression and Anxiety Recovery Program. Our developers implemented Big Data algorithms to choose activities for each user, analyzing data collected from all users.

As a result, our client, Dr. Nedley, has a mental health application that meets all his requirements. Also, the UI/UX design of the NLS app is appealing and intuitive. As an outcome, he can now attract more people to his program.

Read how Dr. Nedley characterizes a cooperation with Cleveroad on the NLS project:

So, if you are looking for a mHealth app development company - Cleveroad will be an excellent choice. We are an IT service provider with 13+ years of experience developing web, desktop, and mobile solutions. Our specialists have practical expertise in creating Healthcare and Telemedicine solutions, such as EHR, EMR, ERX, patient portals, remote patient monitoring, and others helping clinics with digital transformation.

By choosing Cleveroad for mHealth app development, you will get such benefits:

• Complete consulting services with our domain experts to ensure your health app is compliant with all industry regulations
• Flexible cooperation models based on your healthcare needs: IT Staff Augmentation services, Dedicated Team services, Project-Based model
• Building mHealth software solutions complying with industry regulations (GDPR, HIPAA, PIPEDA, and more)
• On-demand services: Healthcare app creation from scratch or legacy systems modernization, cloud solutions development, IT consulting, UI/UX design, etc.
• Post-release support and maintenance of your mHealth solution for further development
• Providing robust data security and signing NDA per your request

Summing up, we can add that mHealth application development solutions really change the world and improve patients’ experience substantially. So if you are looking for a good and reliable software development company to create a custom mobile medical app for your hospital or healthcare organization, the Cleveroad team is ready to help you! Appeal to us today and get a mobile health app delivered on time and within your budget.