The current pandemic situations have restricted people to their homes. While all other sectors are switching to remote working, it was challenging for the healthcare industry to cope with the same. Thankfully, there were telemedicine apps like Practo, ZocDoc, Teladoc, and more. These helped patients seek medical attention virtually, at the comfort of their home and without spreading the virus.

Over the last year, telemedicine apps have gained immense popularity. In fact, the global health market is rising at 44.2% and is estimated to reach $112 billion by 2025. Online healthcare apps like Practo are inspiring other business owners and entrepreneurs to build their own telemedicine apps.

Why Launch Your Own Telemedicine Like Practo?

The main objective of these apps is to enable remote access to healthcare services for users from the comfort of their homes. But it is worth noticing that these telemedicine apps have made soaring profits amid pandemic. One of the popular on-demand platforms recently launched a coronavirus assessment tool, stating that their apps recorded 10,000 transactions per day.

Even Practo Technologies registered a growth of 600% in video consultations since the lockdown started. And 70% of the users were found to be first-time telemedicine app users. Hence, investing in a branded telemedicine app can be a wise choice. Sounds interesting, right?

There might be many questions coming across while you plan to build your own telemedicine app. How does Practo work? How does a telemedicine app like Practo make money? And the list can be long. Out of all the questions, the one that remains unanswered is- How much does it cost to build an app like Practo?

 Before you get the answer to this, it is essential to understand what features make these apps useful and popular.

What Are The Must-have Features For Telemedicine Apps Like Practo/ZocDoc?

Most of the health tech apps like Practo and ZocDoc have a patient-centric model. If you want to create an app on similar lines, here’s what you must include:

• Easy doctor and patient registration: No one likes a tedious registration process, be it online or offline. Try to keep the registration process simple with minimal data requirements.
• Fast and hassle-free doctor appointment booking: A seamless user interface and doctor/patient dashboard are something you cannot miss out on. It plays a crucial role in helping patients connect to doctors and manage/book appointments. 
• Video/Audio/Text consultation: For maximum efficiency, the app must be capable of providing high-quality audio and video consultation services. The real-time chat window is also a desirable feature that lets patients consult doctors through texts and can send media files like images of records.
• Secure payment gateway: Your health-tech app must be integrated with multiple secure payment options. It also must be capable of auto-generating invoices to make payments transparent and fast. When you give multiple payment options to the users, customers are more likely to complete the transaction. Do you know, about 40% of consumers prefer apps with multiple payment options.
• Medicine delivery options: Health-tech apps like Practo have medicine delivery features. Here patients can use the doctor’s prescriptions and shop for the medicines. Practo arranges home delivery of these within the shortest time.
• Electronic health records: Your health-tech app needs to have enough storage options to accommodate the health records of the patients. In addition, since medical records are highly confidential, you need to ensure they aren’t subjected to any data breaches.
• Doctor listing and details: You need to add a section that has a list of board-certified physicians and facilitates. It helps users to choose a health service provider that suits their requirements(nature of illness, location, and budget) You can also add reviews for each of these doctors, so patients can choose a reliable doctor with suitable treatment options. 
• Geotagging: This feature helps patients to locate doctors and insurance companies at a specified location. 
• Appointment notifications: You can use this feature to send short messages to the users regarding an upcoming appointment, or a promotional offer or any other relevant information. 

Besides, there are many more features to launch, run and grow your telemedicine app. Want to have a quick overview of unique and exclusive features? Get your feature book here.

How Much Does It Cost To Build Telemedicine Apps Like Practo/ZocDoc?

The cost to develop a health care app depends on various factors. The list of factors can be the operating system you choose, technology you prefer, the features you decide to include in your app, etc. Based on the requirements, you can hire a telemedicine app development team. This team will basically include:

Telemedicine app designer– To take care of UX/UI designs. Choose someone with an exceptional portfolio, and you can be assured of high returns. Usually, the good ones charge at least 15$ per hour.  

Telemedicine app developers– Both, front-end and back-end, who have experience in building iOS/Android/Cross-platform applications- For a mobile application backed by a web portal, the back-end development process becomes complex and therefore may cost more around $25,000.

Telemedicine app testers– To run tests to ensure the end-product is glitch-free. The average hourly rate to hire app testers is at least 50$ per hour. 

Then you will also need a project manager who coordinates the whole process with you. The next factor to consider while charting out cost estimation is the technology stack. For each of the features, you need to select a technology stack diligently. For example, you can either choose IBM, Apache Flink, Spark, Cisco, or Hadoop for real-time analytics. For secure payment, you can choose either Stripe, Paypal, etc. The more advanced the technology stack, the more it will cost. An iOS app may cost around $200 to host on the App store. Also, the cost to host an app in Android’s Play Store is a mere 25$.

Not to forget, the cost will also depend on from where you hire the application development team. This is because the hourly rates for application development companies vary geographically. 

For example, if you hire a company in the Asia region, the hourly charges for app development are around $40 to 60$, while the same for a US company is $150- $250. Hence, the average cost of telemedicine app development can be around USD 20,000, considering MVP development. However, it can vary based on the features, functionality and a lot more things. And this might go up to USD 100,000.

Worried for the cost? Well, this can be resolved by hiring a proficient telemedicine app development company.  Code Brew can help you launch your own telemedicine app like Practo without spending a fortune. Want to know how? Let’s connect now!