How to Develop a Healthcare Mobile App like Medscape

While developing a healthcare app like Medscape requires integrating cutting-edge technology with medical knowledge to provide dependable, user-friendly solutions. It is mandatory to follow guidelines such as HIPAA and other healthcare laws. And for enhancing user experience you have to add features like medication references, health news, and clinical tools.

By focussing on safe data management and providing value to patients and healthcare professionals, you may develop a powerful app that revolutionizes healthcare information access and distribution.

There is no indication that the market for medical apps will slow down despite its rapid growth. Based on research, the global market is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.2% from 2023 to 2029, reaching $8.031 billion.

Source: valuates.com

Given the market’s expansion, investing in creating an app similar to Medscape makes sense. The market for online pharmacy applications is expected to grow at a rate of 14.5% over the next five years. In 2024, online pharmacy apps will have a user penetration rate of over 23%, which will only rise to 30% or higher over the next five years.

What is the Medscape App?

Medscape is a mobile platform designed for healthcare professionals. In addition to the most recent medical news, it provides a wide range of clinical reference tools, medication information, condition information, and medical education.

Medscape provides clinical guidelines, medication interactions, medical calculators, and tools for continuing education to physicians, nurses, and medical students. The software is well-known for its extensive medical information and user-friendly layout, intended to facilitate educated decision-making in patient care.

It also offers over 450 calculators to assist doctors with the complex calculations required for diagnosis and treatment.

7 Key Features of the Medscape Healthcare App

Knowing about the competitor’s top features helps shape the healthcare application.

• Latest Medical News

Get the latest medical trends, research discoveries, and advancements to keep healthcare workers informed.

• CME and Education

Take advantage of Continuing Medical Education (CME) opportunities to broaden your knowledge, fulfill certification requirements, and keep current on medical advancements.

• Procedure Tutorials

For seasoned professionals and novices, step-by-step instructions and videos covering a range of medical procedures offer comprehensive insights to enhance technique and patient outcomes.

• Drug Reference

A thorough database of medications that includes information on dosages, interactions, adverse effects, and usage to guarantee patients receive safe and efficient care.

• Disease & Condition Database

This extensive resource covers the symptoms, diagnosis, course of treatment, and prognosis of several illnesses and conditions, supporting clinical decision-making.

• Medical Calculators

A set of medical instruments for quickly and precisely calculating doses, BMI, cardiovascular risk evaluations, and other health parameters.

• Pill Identification

Recognize unknown pills by their color, shape, or imprint to assist medical professionals in making sure the right drug is given or delivered.

A Complete Guide to Build a Healthcare App Like Medscape

Developing medical software such as Medscape necessitates a systematic approach to fusing medical expertise with contemporary technology. Essential processes include conducting market research, selecting features like drug references, medical news, and clinical tools, and designing a user-friendly interface.

• Deep Dive into Medical Terminology and Regulations

Understanding medical terms and guidelines is essential for creating a healthcare application. Medical terminology and concepts must be used appropriately for the app to be clear and dependable. Compliance with healthcare legislation like HIPAA and GDPR is crucial to safeguarding user data and maintaining legal operations.

• Partner with Medical Experts

Working with physicians and nurses allows us to improve the app’s functionality and content. Their opinions are constructive in meeting user requests and guaranteeing the app’s medical accuracy. The content is regularly validated with medical professionals to ensure that it is current and accurate.

• Integrate with Electronic Health Records

One essential feature of healthcare apps is their seamless connection with EHRs. While guaranteeing safe data transfer, the app should allow data sharing with widely used EHR systems. Patient data is safeguarded, and confidentiality is upheld through authentication and encryption.

• Offer Personalized Content

Customization improves the user’s experience. Based on user preferences, the app uses algorithms to suggest pertinent news, articles, and Continuing Medical Education (CME) courses.

• Develop a Robust Drug Database

A healthcare app must have an extensive drug database and provide current information on medication dosages, adverse effects, and interactions. User-friendly search features facilitate quick access to pharmacological details, helping patients make well-informed medical decisions.

• Incorporate Medical Calculators and Tools

Including medical tools and calculators expands the app’s capabilities. Tools for calculating dose, BMI, and other medical characteristics are helpful. Trust must be upheld by verifying the precision and dependability of these instruments through validation with medical professionals.

• Offer CME and Continuing Education

Offering opportunities for Continuing Medical Education (CME) is a crucial component. The app provides CME courses through partnerships with recognized medical establishments. Monitoring user progress and rewarding completion with certificates promotes professional growth.

• Facilitate Collaboration and Networking

Developing communities and forums within the app encourages cooperation among medical experts. Users can interact, exchange experiences, and talk about medical issues. Interaction with already existing medical social networks improves networking even further.

Prioritize the most critical features, ensure they address the issue, and often iterate before creating the minimum viable product (MVP) for healthcare software. Constructing an MVP instead of a full-fledged product immediately gives you a competitive advantage since you can get into the market faster and get user feedback.

Tech Stacks Required to Develop a Healthcare App like Medscape

Developing a complicated healthcare app requires diverse technologies and frameworks to ensure adequate functionality and user experience.

• Healthcare-Specific Machine Learning Frameworks

Developing healthcare applications like Medscape requires the use of machine learning frameworks. Two well-liked options for integrating machine learning on embedded and mobile devices are TensorFlow Lite and Caffe2.

A condensed, mobile-friendly version of TensorFlow is available with TensorFlow Lite. These machine-learning programs help in the predictive analysis of health status.

• FHIR-Based Frameworks

Interoperability requires integration with healthcare data standards. The FHIR Server and FHIR Client are essential components here. An FHIR Server implements the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, enabling the safe storage and retrieval of medical data.

• Electronic Health Record Integration

Creating healthcare apps requires integrating them with current EHR systems. EHR APIs offer integration possibilities with popular EHR systems like Epic, Cerner, and Allscripts. These APIs make the seamless exchange of health records between the app and these services possible.

• Healthcare Data Analytics

Robust analytics frameworks are necessary for analyzing healthcare data. Extensive dataset processing and analysis are critical components of the Hadoop architecture, which manages massive amounts of health data.

Spark is an additional potent technology that provides speedy and versatile cluster computing, making it easier for the program to process intricate data analysis promptly.

• Medical Image Processing

ITK (Insight Toolkit) and OpenCV are requirements for applications that work with medical imaging. Developed primarily for image analysis applications, OpenCV is a fundamental toolkit for image processing operations. Another open-source toolkit with advanced medical image processing features is ITK, which specializes in picture analysis and registration.

• Health Data Encryption

Safeguarding confidential medical information is essential. One popular encryption algorithm for protecting data is AES. Data transmission between the application and users is protected by TLS, which guarantees secure communication over the Internet.

• Healthcare-Specific Cloud Platforms

The app functionality is enhanced by using cloud platforms designed for healthcare data management. A HIPAA-compliant cloud solution for storing and analyzing medical data is provided by AWS HealthLake.

A collection of APIs for interacting with healthcare systems and data are offered by the Google Cloud Healthcare API, providing scalable and secure data handling.

• Mobile Health Frameworks

ResearchKit and WearOS are two practical frameworks for mobile health apps. While WearOS facilitates the development of apps for smartwatches running Wear OS, expanding wearable device health-tracking features, ResearchKit is designed explicitly for creating research-focused iOS apps.

Trending Technologies That Can Enhance an On-Demand Healthcare App Like Medscape

Medical practitioners increasingly depend on mobile applications such as MedScape to quickly obtain critical information. These technologies Healthcare app developers should keep ahead of the curve by implementing these three cutting-edge technological ideas to improve functionality and user experience:

• Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has emerged as an advanced integration tool in the healthcare ecosystem. It even provides features like collaborative work, virtual patient analysis, and enhanced effectiveness. While on the backend, processing, analyzing, and storing the data.

• Artificial Intelligence

AI healthcare systems have been a big help to the industry and patients. Also, it reduces the time for disease recognition and even identifies potential health issues for better prevention and cure. For a better understanding, let’s take the example of IBM Watson, which uses AI to compute huge medical datasets and assists doctors in the best way.

• Blockchain

For example, let’s look at Gaurdtime, a blockchain-based solution that assists healthcare professionals in securing patients’ crucial data. It even helps create a transparent and secure ecosystem by giving patients control over their data. These features help the healthcare app to make an edge over their competitors. Which even sums up to a better relationship between medics and patients.

• IoT

For example, Philips eICU has developed a remote patient monitoring system. Patients can get full access to all vitals of organs working and even with indicated signs of risk and abnormality. IoT can help doctors to be quickly alerted about any critical abnormality through apps and hospital systems for early treatment.

• Big Data

Past patient data and similar data sets are used to identify the symptoms. The system analyzes large datasets to understand the symptoms and disease better. It can even suggest some medications according to the symptoms.

Innovative Features That Can Enhance an On-Demand Healthcare App Like Medscape

To stand out in the highly competitive healthcare app market, businesses should consider implementing cutting-edge features beyond conventional offerings. The following seven aspects can improve a Medscape-like healthcare app:

• AI-Powered Symptom Checker

Users can receive preliminary evaluations and possible diagnoses by including an AI-powered symptom checker, saving time and avoiding needless doctor trips.

• Virtual Consultations

In particular, in remote or underserved locations, virtual consultation features improve accessibility and reduce wait times by enabling patients to communicate with medical professionals remotely.

• Medication Reminders and Tracking

Patients can follow their treatment programs more closely and experience fewer drug errors with the assistance of a medication reminder and tracking function.

• Personalized Health Plans

Patients can be empowered to actively participate in their treatment by having individualized health plans tailored to their requirements, goals, and medical history.

• Integration with Wearable Devices

Integrating wearable devices with valuable health data, including heart rate, sleep habits, and activity levels, can facilitate comprehensive health monitoring.

• Patient Education Videos

Watching informative movies on various health-related topics can help patients better understand their problems, available treatments, and preventative actions.

• Social Networking for Patients

Establishing a social networking site where patients can connect and share experiences can improve their experiences with healthcare.

Cost of Developing a Healthcare App Like Medscape

How much would it cost to develop a Medscape-like online healthcare application? Creating an online pharmacy app might be expensive depending on its complexity, the features you want to include, and the resources you use. An online healthcare application’s development cost could be anywhere between $100,000 to $500,000, depending on the size of the team and the frameworks used.

Conclusion

Creating a medical mobile app such as Medscape requires a strategy that blends innovative technology and in-depth knowledge of the medical field by putting the user’s requirements first, including quick access to clinical assistance, medication reference tools, and medical information.

Developers at Appventurez can build a healthcare system that offers genuine benefits to medical practitioners. Important tasks include determining the app’s fundamental functions, ensuring it complies with healthcare laws, choosing the appropriate tech stack, and designing a safe and user-friendly interface.

Appventurez, a leading app development company in India, supports healthcare startups and industries by providing innovative development solutions. We are committed to delivering robust and reliable solutions to the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. With our industry expertise, we help businesses create impactful products that enhance global health outcomes.