Features to Integrate into your Healthcare App

10 min read

In order to make a solid digital product for healthcare, it is necessary to analyze its final users, evaluate the environment of its application, and have a clear vision of what value the mobile healthcare solution offers or what actual issue it resolves.

Features to Integrate into your Healthcare App

In the following section, the core features, distinct functionality, as well as useful APIs and other integrations are described in greater detail. These elements will advance your healthcare apps.

Navigation system

A good idea is to create way-finding apps finding their way into hospitals, fitness centers and clinics or add this feature in the existing software solution. This definitely improves the experience since in real life visitors and patients always ask for directions. This can be rather difficult to find your way around in a huge medical center and most probably you need to ask the medical staff at least 3 times till you get your destination point.

The same functionality can be proposed for new medical personnel and optimize the time of staff while being interrupted each time they are asked.

Alerts & reminders

Well-settled notifications inside medical applications can be real lifesavers. This feature can be devoted to tracking the health vitals, reminders in terms of the appointments with doctors or lab analysis, and so on. Chronic disease management binds users to take prescribed medication on time and in the right dose.

These push notifications are usually integrated from Firebase and Twilio. These elements collect information about how the user reacts to them and present this data as a dashboard. Then, medical personnel access these statistics and can evaluate the patient’s condition and update the treatment plan.

Security-compliant live chats & video conferencing (HIPAA compliance)

Video conferencing is a top-notch functionality that removes distance barriers. This allows for remote doctor visiting, usage among medical professionals for educational purposes or emergencies. To stress, this feature should follow the security guidelines (HIPAA, GDPR, etc.) and its top-notch implementation lies in end-to-end messaging encryption.

Live chats can be introduced as a solution to getting support, administrative advice, booking an appointment with a therapist and receive answers 24/7/365. Alternatively, live chats can be embedded on the medical website in the form of a magnet and increase used traction. The extra service of a live chat can be advanced with the help of Artificial Intelligence, aka chatbot.

Seamless payment methods

The payment feature is utilized in any sort of application development. The process of making a transaction should be seamless and allows for easy mobile payment for medical services, medicine, or insurance. The fewer steps the payment process involves, the greater the user experience is.

It is possible to integrate multiple payment options like with the help of a credit card, PayPal or Payoneer services into the healthcare app, and this functionality can be implemented with the help of Braintree or Stripe payment gateway technology. As well, there is an advanced option of Apple Pay and Google Wallet integration.

To remind you, payment gateways should employ PCI-DSS regulation and high-end security standards since payment information is also subject to the personal data.

Feedback system

Well-designed feedback systems will definitely assist the healthcare industry to obtain wide and deep insights from the markets and end-users. Collecting feedback from inpatients and outpatients can be integrated into iOS & Android apps or via online and web surveys.

Real-user feedback will allow for improvements in healthcare services and centers as well as for medical research, practices, and pharmaceuticals domain.

IoT device integration

The Internet of Things in the healthcare area is a growing trend and is its innovative future like remote surgeries with the help of robotics. The study conducted by Business Insider informs that in general, 80% of users want to wear such fitness gadgets.

Thus, wearable devices like smart health watches, medical gadgets like ECG or blood pressure monitors, fitness trackers that collect the necessary information and distribute it across the interconnected services are in the increased demand. To mention, Accenture provides statistics that the usage of wearable raised to 33% and the market will exceed USD 120 billion in 2023.

Wearable technologies will benefit in regards to patient monitoring and rise in the client lifetime value. Hospitals can decrease their number of patient visits and at the same time help patients to engage with their own health.

For instance, Mocacare allows for monitoring heart condition with the help of a smart tracker and delivers info of heart rate, blood oxygen, pulse wave velocity. iHealth is another example of a company that offers a wide range of IoT devices for personal tracking like weight, blood pressure and glucose, temperature and professional medical equipment.

Apple Health integration

Apple has a special HealthKit offering a great bunch of tools for iOS and watchOS to design and develop a deeper and reacher medical application. Health Records API gathers user information like allergies, health conditions, labs, medication, health vitals, and so on, With its help, it is possible to perform necessary operations inside the app. Other healthcare APIs from Apple relate to medical research and care, help to connect apps to fitness accessories and gadgets

Google Health integration

Cloud Healthcare API and Google Fit SDK allow for developing secure and innovative applications operating on Android. These technical tools similar to the Apple HealthKit assist healthcare app developers with design and development guidelines and detailed supporting documentation.

APIs and 3rd party services for healthcare app integration

There is a range of different healthcare app APIs that can be used in development. APIs are the pre-development tools that have a set of routines, communication protocols among distinct components.

Aside from Apple and Google that invest in uniting health apps and the whole health environment heavily, other 3rd party services offer great solutions. Here, we highlighted a few interesting ones:

1. Drchrono – the service helps to make use of the improved electronic medical records for medical establishments and doctors. Once this 3rd party tool is integrated into healthcare apps, It offers the functionality of leaving notes and ideas at the doctor’s messaging center, sharing information among the health professionals and colleagues, CRUD (create-read-update-delete) prescriptions. The solution is available for the iOS platform solely.

2. Chino.io – the tool helps with complying with data protection and security during healthcare software development.

3. BetterDoctor – this 3rd party technology has extensive documentation and is easy to integrate into healthcare apps. The service has the functionality of selecting a doctor or other medical specialist based on their detailed profiles.

Box API – a technology that helps with secure medical data management. Basically, if the future app needs to collect, store, and share information like health records, lab and test analysis, medications, then the Box API is a good service to integrate in healthcare apps. The tool is compliant with web, Android, and iOS as well as with the most programming languages like Node.js, Ruby, Python, etc.

5. Human API – this API has a set of distinct parts and functionality. This includes work with patient information and profiles as well as keeping health vital, lab and testing results, service reviews, e-prescription. This API has easy-to-read guidelines for all major platforms – iOS, Android, web.

6. Doximity – this 3rd party service connects patients and doctors inside the healthcare system. Doximity evaluates the health professionals, their licensing, and practices. Then the patients can review a detailed profile of these registered specialists and make better choices.

Also, it is worth mentioning, that there is a demand to create additional APIs to make the healthcare app development processes faster. The market still lacks innovative, ready-made solutions to interconnect and exchange medical information derived from different databases, platforms, and systems among users. This is a great opportunity to provide value to the medical sector and benefit from it.