Doctor Appointment App Development: A Complete Guide

Convenience is perhaps the most in-demand aspect when scheduling an appointment with a doctor. In the current state, however, the medical infrastructure is so marred with mismanaged inefficiencies that patient convenience seems distant. Queues at the hospital or the over-occupancy of general practitioners cause inconvenience to patients. 

Out of them, the effective strategy of appointment booking applications has offered an exceptional solution for customers. Popular apps like Doctor-on-demand and Zocdoc have transformed the healthcare sector with advanced functionalities. Due to high demand, the combined efforts of healthcare procedures have been extending their distinction. A user-centric doctor appointment app like ZocDoc utilizes marketability measures and broadens the prominence of doctors in the healthcare vertical. 

Since adopting apps like ZocDoc, the healthcare industry has witnessed a noteworthy increment in the global market. Convenience-centric platforms are altering the method patients interact with healthcare providers and hospitals. They facilitate the appointment booking procedure with just a few clicks in their apps. A proficient mobile application development agency can be advantageous to build a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc to ensure a better user experience. 

On-Demand Doctor Appointment App Development: Market Overview

Were you aware that 52.2% of healthcare specialists spend 10 to 30 hours per week finalizing the appointments? 

Patients can utilize apps comparable to Zocdoc to book doctor’s appointments, pay for bills and procedures, and discuss issues with professionals like doctors, pediatricians, physicians, and psychologists. Since the pandemic, it has been noted that 74% of doctors and patients think about continuing the video conference functionality for consultation. 

Even if we bring the market statistics to the forefront, the reports by The Insight Partners state that the income of the online doctor appointment booking category is estimated to surpass $927.09 million USD by 2028. Investing capital in a doctor appointment app like ZocDoc is a straightforward possibility, and ensuring the conduct of a competitor analysis before beginning the healthcare app development is beneficial.

How Does Doctor Appointment Booking Mobile Application Work?

If you are considering building a doctor appointment booking app like Zocdoc and Practor, you must be curious how these apps work. With a proper understanding of the app’s functioning, decision-makers make conclusions about the app’s layout and flow. The step-by-step methodology below will help consumers initiate this app.

• User Registration and Profile Setup

Before utilizing the app and booking an appointment, users must complete a user profile and specify if they are registering as patients or doctors. If the user is a patient looking for treatment and consultation, they must offer data about previous significant therapies, allergies, surgeries, ongoing medicines, and many more details that can assist further treatment. If the user is a doctor or a trained specialist, they must offer details about their medication education, professional background and specializations, accomplishments, noteworthy surgeries conducted, and more.

• Review and Rating Analysis

After utilizing the search bar, the patient can be several searches and decisions away from the kind of physician they desire. Therefore, they require a decisive app packed with progressive search filters to discover the suitable match of doctors who satisfy their standards, present a reasonable patient experience, have practical treatment programs, and have earned distinguished ratings and reviews.

• Schedule Appointments

After the doctor finalizes the treatment, patients can review the open appointment places from the calendar for the day, month, or year of the doctor and the time they need to make the appointment possible. Doctor appointment booking apps like Zocdoc offer instantaneous appointment booking and eliminate the window for overlap.

• Integration with Personal Calendar

Zocdoc-like apps incorporate personal calendars with patient appointments. As soon as the appointment is finalized on both ends, the calendar sends time-to-time notifications regarding the upcoming appointment. With the assistance of a calendar, the doctor and patient stay updated about the consultation. 

• Payment Process

Once the consultation is completed, the payment options for the patients’ doctor services will appear. Since the payment option depends on the application’s planning, the user may also have to begin the process with payment.

Step-wise Zocdoc-Like Doctor Appointment Booking App Development Process

The healthcare economy’s generous elevation has seized the audiences’ attention in contemporary times. Given this system and the current scenario, many healthcare mobile app trends have become eccentric in this classification. Here, we mention some steps in the cogent custom mobile app development process to develop patient- and doctor-centric scheduling applications.

• Define Your Requirement

To build a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc, hospitals, and healthcare practitioners must do a market analysis and define the requirements they would be required to clarify the development company. Understanding the requirement assists the healthcare industry in planning the beginning of the application. 

• Finalize the Features and Functionalities

Once you have finalized and defined the project, the next step is to compare the app idea to existing apps and finalize the features and functionalities. The features and advanced functionalities support the complexity of the project and help the development agency understand the requirements. 

• Facilitate Your Database

It’s the foremost phase in your medical app development, which assists you in building a strategy to contact doctors and clinics to add them to your database. The more extensive the database, the more promising opportunities you can offer to your patients leading to reducing the bounce rate.

• Hire Professional Team

After assembling primary hospital-related and specialized information concerning your app vision, you need only discover your exemplary mobile application development agency. When choosing one, you should review their consultation and development assistance to the healthcare industry. With thorough company research about their previous project and portfolios, finalize the right choice for your project.

• Decide the Technology Stack

The doctor appointment mobile app is your prioritized app, guiding your healthcare enterprise to its most distinguished elevation. Therefore, when planning to develop a doctor appointment app like ZocDoc, you must pick the technology stack with an intricate understanding of the industry, which can assist you in creating a robust product. After attending to your needs, your hospital app development company will present you with the technology stack suitable for the app. 

• UI/UX App Design

App developers must always capture the thorough necessities of the preliminary audiences, and the UI/UX app design should be considered according to their importance and needs. The layout of the doctor and admin panel should be adequately built to destroy all difficulties. As we have witnessed in Zocdoc, the interface is favorably layman-friendly and custom with instructive resources.

• Systematic App Development

The app development phase begins after the app UI/UX design is authorized. Your hired team of app developers will use the most reasonable techniques to assist you in developing a telemedicine app like Teladoc.

• Ensure HIPAA Compliance

Whenever creating a healthcare application for patients that requires them to feed their information, HIPAA compliance is a measure that your app must follow. It is for your app’s benefit, as it possesses development and app protection, the most profitable procedures to maintain your app’s high performance and safety. 

For more reasonable app protection, you can pursue these actions:

• Integrating SSL certificate
• Guarantee the most elevated level of app data encryption
• Adherence to GDPR, HITECH Act, and other standards.

• Quality Assurance

While guaranteeing HIPAA compliance, you must have executed safety authorities and documented algorithms to deliver strong performance and offer an exceptional user experience. However, to ensure that the code built is flawless without errors, loopholes, or bugs, you must accept the assistance of QA engineers. They ensure that your doctor appointment app functions well before deployment with manual and automated assistance.

•  Deployment and Maintenance

Considering that your doctor appointment app is prepared to be deployed for the general masses and used by patients and doctors, developers will help you deploy it to the Google Play Store and Apple App Store as per your platform discussion. The same app development company also offers app maintenance and support for future updates and bug fixing. 

Must-Have Features to Build a Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc

Considering that the healthcare app features for doctors and patients have an essential role in future use, it is preferred to include the ones that can ensure smooth operational performance. Be it the user profile, search bar, video consultation, or third-party payment gateway integration, every feature must be considered during the development process for building advanced doctor appointment booking apps like Zocdoc. 

Below is the list of must-have features to include when building an on-demand appointment booking app:

1. Stakeholders’ Profiles
2. Doctor and Clinic Search
3. Geo-Location Based Search
4. Appointment Booking
5. Doctor Review
6. For the Patient Profile Creation
7. Symptom Checker
8. Appointment Reminders
9. Online Video or Call Consultation/Telemedicine
10.  e-Prescription Management Toolkit
11.  Payment Gateway Integration
12.  Healthcare App Integrations
13.  Subscription Services for Patients & Doctors
14.  Cost Calculator 
15.  Wearable Device Integration
16.  Conversational Chatbot

Read More- AI in Healthcare

Why Should You Create a Doctor Appointment Scheduling Application?

The advantages of an on-demand doctor appointment app development can alter according to the company and commodity type, such as clinics and personal product-based corporations. Nevertheless, the final objective will intersect and help them in the subsequent ways:

• Enhanced Patient Experience

A doctor appointment app like Zocdoc facilitates the complete booking procedure, making it more comfortable to confer with a doctor. Patients must discover the most suitable doctor who meets their needs, review their availability, reserve an appointment, and attend their consultation virtually. 

• Boosted Patient Engagement

The Zocdoc-like app provides patients with an effortless method of reserving an appointment with a doctor. This allows patients to meet with healthcare providers feasibly and feel more engaged in the therapy process and healthcare conclusions.

• Streamlined Administrative Operations

The healthcare app also permits you to automate appointment scheduling, cancellation procedures, rescheduling, and reducing administrative burdens and workloads on the healthcare team. 

• Time Management

Doctors can utilize the doctor appointment app to review and fix their timetable according to the reserved appointments to reduce patients’ waiting periods and the possibility of overbooking and forgetting appointments.

Factors Affecting the Cost to Develop a Doctor Appointment App Like Zocdoc

When it comes to the cost of developing a healthcare app like Zocdoc, there are multiple factors that vary the estimated budget. Considering that every aspect constitutes its value, the final cost to build an app with necessary features and the ones the decision-makers need becomes dependent. The factors below combined together bring out the estimated budget investment for hospitals and clinics:

1. Features and Functionalities
2. Type of App
3. UI/UX App Design
4. Development Duration
5. Development Team

How Much Does a Doctor Appointment App Like Zocdoc Cost Based on Features?

Bringing the aspect of features in the forefront, the doctor mobile app development cost depends on the individual expense of features. The features of an app defines the functionalities for the users. The more advanced the features, the better the user experience and the more AI app development costs. 

The table below brings forth the individual app features cost for hospitals and clinics to get clarity on capital investment. 

Breakdown of Cost of Developing a Doctor Appointment App Like Zocdoc

Considering what we have mentioned, multiple technological factors influence the healthcare app development cost and define the final budget for healthcare providers and businesses. Choosing the appropriate tools and technology is critical in making an app investment.

Creating a doctor appointment scheduling app costs between $30,000 and $60,000, and adding advanced features like healthcare app features for doctors and patients can cost between $100,000 and $150,000.

Build a Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc With AppsChopper

Healthcare applications have outperformed globally and guarantee an optimistic future with the advancements. In this blog, we have attempted to surround the primary stats and points that would assist you in estimating the cost of developing a healthcare app like Zocdoc. 

The exemplary preference of the mobile app development team can suggest the most suitable healthcare software development services that can comprehensively level up your company’s standards. One must choose AppsChopper as their primary choice to create a healthcare app like Zocdoc, keeping our industry experience and skilled knowledge.