How to Make a Doctor Appointment App for your Medical Services

Do you Need a Booking App for your Healthcare Service?

Can your clinic survive the digital competition without an app? Isn’t it burdensome for your personnel to handle snowballing appointments, with all cancellations and rearrangements? The COVID-19 outbreak made it even more difficult for your managers to deal with appointment scheduling and tons of patients.

This is an insightful read on why and how to make a doctor appointment app with all must-have features for your business and your patients’ needs. In addition, we’ll mention the best strategies to promote your app online. Check our cost analysis and a few examples of the top apps for clinics further in the article.

Pros of Making an App for Appointment Scheduling in your Medical Center

A lack of digital booking capabilities is the major reason for 80% of patients to prefer another clinic. When it comes to medical services, nearly 60% of customers would rather look for new healthcare practitioners on the web. It might be a signal that you need a doctor appointment app as a digital solution for your healthcare service right now. Contact our app development company for more details today - we’ll be glad to help you shape your app idea.

Making a doctor scheduling app for iOS or Android is an effective panacea for your customers, workers and your business. Consider its pros:

For patients/clients

Accessibility of appointment scheduling around-the-clock is one of the features that boosts client satisfaction. According to the statistics, the proportion of internet users aged 50 years and above grew from 30% to 55% in just 2 years. And 39% of older customers choose a medical center that allows them to book meetings in real time.

Such options of a booking app as calendar synchronization and web-based scheduling 24/7 help handle problems with logistics and time coordination.

For healthcare professionals

Development of a custom app for doctor appointments scheduling contributes to workload optimization. It allows doctors to work more productively with personalized booking pages, for example.

Additionally, it may broaden the scope of non–face-to-face care services (but reduce the time for each of them) with telemedicine platform integrations. Such features as video conferencing, texting, voice messages are preferable among doctors and patients too.

For business owners

• Lower percentage of non-attendance

Bookings via an app will help you avoid the bulk of patient “no-shows” – you may add a feature for clients to get notified about a new vacant slot.

• Saving costs (a lot)

A single unused time slot may cost you $200+. So, isn’t it the best time for you to consider developing a doctor appointment app to tackle the patient “no-show” problem?

• Time efficiency

Take into account that the average no show rate is 18.8%. It takes nearly 10 minutes to cancel a booking via phone. In total, approximately 40 minutes per day – that’s how much time canceled appointments may cost you.

How to Develop a Doctor Appointment App – Must-Have Features and Promotion

As you can see, to save time, money, nerves and stay competitive, you need a mobile app for doctor appointment booking. Here’s an instruction on how to create it:

1) Analyze your primary competitors

To do competitor analysis, answer these questions, among all:

What apps do your competitors have? What are their features, their strong and weak sides?

2) Define your target audience

Key factors:

• Sex and age
• Professions
• Family status
• Patients’ expectations from an app
• Location
• The most frequent diseases in your region (chronic, infectious like COVID-19, etc.) and so on.

3) Create a doctor database

Portfolios of your healthcare professionals will show their expertise and make it easier for patients to choose and rate their doctors. 

4) Make a list of features/functions

Peer into our list of the most preferred features just in a few paragraphs below.

5) Plan the sources of income

You may either charge for subscription or take fees for each service. You should also decide whether your app will be free to download. Is it going to have any membership levels or VIP programs for both doctors and patients?

6) Outsource app development

Outsourcing app development is highly relevant during the pandemic. You may hire our top app developers. We can bring your mobile app idea for your healthcare services to the market.

7) Promote your app

Let’s concentrate on the features and functions for your doctor appointment scheduling app. Further on, you will read about the best promotional strategies.

You Need these Features in your App

Here’s a list of must-have functions and options that patients and healthcare professionals would like to see in their application for doctor appointment (based on our research):

• Account creation
• One-click “Book Now” button
• Emergency button + widget
• Text/audio/video communication
• Searching and filtering
• Google Maps integration
• E-prescriptions
• “Share your progress” feature and many more.

And these are not the only features that will help your app for doctor appointments to be more recognizable among your competitors’ mobile applications. Reach your target audience with the above must-have features. Use the best promotional strategy for your app.

How to Promote your Clinic’s App

Make use of the top healthcare marketing strategies:

• Boost visibility with social media (Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Facebook, etc.)
• Look for partnerships
• Take advantage of influencer marketing
• Use paid ads
• Build doctor referrals
• Encourage patients to write reviews

If you look at all the instructions on how to develop your clinic’s app and facilitate its visibility online, you may get an idea that the whole procedure may cost you a fortune. Especially concerning the cost for paid ads. It won’t. Read about the price estimation for doctor appointments scheduling app development.

Prices for Doctor Appointment App Creation – Cost Analysis 

To size your app budget, you need to know at least the rough price of developing a doctor booking application. Then, scroll down to dive into the main aspects that define how much it costs to make an Android or iOS app for scheduling meetings with physicians.

Free Preliminary Cost Estimate

A price tag for doctor app development ranges from $20,000 to $350,000. You may find out how much it might cost you to produce an app for booking appointments with doctors right away – book a consultation. We will help you form an idea about the exact sum you should invest in production. Our business analysts will get a prompt cost estimate for you. Mobile app development is our specialty, in which we have no equal.

The Exact Price for the Development of a Doctor Booking App

What is the price for building a mobile app to manage doctor’s appointments? The final price for an mHealth booking application will depend on certain factors that influence the cost to build an app. For instance, you’d like an application similar to Practo. To create an app of that caliber, your budget should be $50,000–$60,000, if you need more advanced features. Developers’ hourly rates may differ drastically – pay attention to that too.

Below you can see sample prices for simpler and more complex apps with different features (estimation in hours).

Sample 1

Sample 2

In case you want some sort of “intelligent scheduling” to predict non-attendance like Radix Health does or employ anything similar to ZocDoc’s artificial intelligence search algorithms, the price may be definitely higher.

Best Examples of Apps for Medical Centers

Check the below examples of the successful digital health players with their strengths and top features:

1. ZocDoc

Top features: telemedicine video consulting + AI search

Strengths: collaborates with telehealth platforms and mental health providers (therapy and psychiatry mostly), free for patients

2. DoctorOnDemand

Top features: GPS tracking + video conferencing + in-app chat

Strengths: a database of US-licensed medical professionals, a winner of the “Best Overall Digital Health Company” award in 2021

3. Practo

Top features: ordering health-related products and medicines + delivery

Strengths: free for patients, works on mobile and web platforms

You have got an idea about the best apps and their key functionality. Let’s sum up how far we have come up to now.

Doctor Booking App Development: Summing up

Tons of apps appear on the eHealthcare market daily. You should catch up with the competition and, more importantly, you might want to save money, as well as decrease the pressure on your employees – they do have hard times with appointments (new, canceled and/or rearranged) in your medical office.

We have armed you with the instructions on how to develop a doctor appointment app and use promotional strategies to boost its popularity. Besides, now you know what features or functions your appointment booking app may have and how much it will cost you to build one.

Or perhaps you already have an application but need to update it. At FutureOne Tech, we have a professional app development team experienced in this niche. Want to see how your doctor appointment booking app may look like? Hit us up in the contact form.