Irrespective of all social, personal, and professional attributes, and with the exception of a few remote tribes, almost every individual on this planet needs access to medical care. Doctors, for this reason, have been among the most respected professionals all through history.
The coronavirus crisis has only elevated the status of doctors and has enhanced their relevance in today’s world. With technology impacting almost every field, it is only natural that even the field of medicine undergoes this transfiguration.
One of the most common manifestations of this convergence of technology and medical services is telemedicine apps. Telemedicine applications have different dimensions – some of them work to provide teleconsultations some of them help get medicines delivered to your home either based on prescription or without them if they are over the counter drugs, and some of them help in fixing appointments with doctors.
Since these apps perform the task of aggregating all the doctors available in the vicinity and presenting them to the USA, they can be, in effect, called Uber for doctors.
Benefits of an on-demand doctors app
The on-demand doctor app provides a plethora of benefits for both doctors and patients, and needless to say, the business that operates the app.
For the user
The user gets more access to doctors. Earlier, the knowledge about a doctor was either based on what users see during their commutes or the doctors their social circles talk about. This heavily limits the possibility of finding the right doctors. With the Ddoctor on-demand app, users can now have access to all the doctors who are available with their reach.
The doctors? listings are further qualified by information like the years of experience and their reviews and star ratings based on users? experiences. In addition, users can filter the doctors based on their specialization and sort doctors based on their consultation fees, enabling them to find the right doctors using the app.
More often than not, a consultation with some doctors is more of a question of a simple conversation and some diagnostic results. Consulting with that doctor might require a cumbersome commute to the clinic, endless hours of waiting, and a lot of other frustrating factors.
With telemedicine in place, the users can consult the doctor remotely by using a video calling feature. They can also directly share the results of the diagnostic tests with the doctor for the next consultation. With a proper app in place, the diagnostic test results can also be stored periodically, enabling easy retrieval.
This feature can be extremely useful for geriatric patients, and there cannot be a more relevant time than right now to stress the importance of teleconsulting with doctors.
For the doctor
The doctors can now gain better visibility because of the app. Their visibility would have earlier been confined to a few channels, but by getting themselves listed on the app, they can increase the avenues of earning.
With teleconsultation, it is no longer required that the doctor will have to be present in a clinic to consult for their patients. This means that doctors can earn from the comfort of their homes. In the long run, it also helps doctors build a brand by increasing the number of reviews and ratings on the app.
Needless to say, even doctors are susceptible to being infected by the COVID-19 when they are in hospitals and clinics. If their expertise facilitates them, they can practice their medical services by staying at their homes.
The Doctor appointment app helps them plan their day better. The app, in essence, functions like a calendar for them, letting them know the number of consultations and the time slots that are filled.
Doctors have always been subject to a point of criticism that they get a lot of income without taxes. In most cases, the patients make their payments online, and it is the responsibility of the app to ensure that it gets transferred to the doctors. With this mechanism, every cent earned by the doctor becomes accountable and taxable, increasing transparency.
The business makes its revenue either from commissions that they get from doctors or by getting a subscription fee from customers for facilities like video calls or in some instances by promotions and advertisements featured on the app.
The different components
As you may have already inferred, and Uber for doctors should have distinct applications for the patient and the doctor. Overseeing both these apps should be an administrator responsible for the sanity and sanctity of the app ecosystem. It is important to ensure that these apps and features are never missed out in the process of on-demand doctor app development.
The patient app
- The patient should be able to register for the services without any hassle. The registration and login should be made available through existing legacy credentials like Google and Facebook. The registration should also create a profile that stores the history of all the medical consultations a patient undergoes.
- They should be able to quickly and efficiently search for doctors in the vicinity. They should be able to filter doctors by their specialization, their cost per consultation, and even the years of experience.
- The patient should be able to input a few vital details like their weight, height, sugar levels, blood group, and a few more details that might come in handy for the doctor even before they consult for the patient.
- The patient should be able to make payments using multiple payment methods for which the app should be integrated with a versatile payment services provider.
- The patient should be provided with a review and rating system using which they can rate and review the experiences with doctors they have consulted.
- If possible, all the facilities and utilities of the app need to be accessible on a website, especially for those who might not be quite acquainted with apps but are well-versed with websites.
- In all of this, it is to be remembered that medical data is one of the most sensitive segments of data and it needs to be handled with meticulous care. There are legal regulations like HIPAA that mandate safeguarding the privacy of patients and their data, and the app business has to keep this in mind.
The doctor app
- The doctor should be, just like patients, able to quickly register for their services. In addition to their basic details, they should also be able to provide information regarding their qualification, the credentials, their additional certifications, and any achievements that increase the credibility of the doctor.
- The doctor should choose the hours of availability and it should be remembered that the patients can approach the doctor only during the hours when they are available. They should also have the flexibility to ser their own costs for consultation.
- The doctors should be able to quickly get the payments made to them processed today at account. It goes a long way in establishing the credibility of the app among doctors.
The administrator
- The administrator should be provided with a dashboard that gives them a birds? eye view of the entire app ecosystem. They should be given access to analytics that helps them analyze the health of the app using which they can arrive at some business intelligence.
- They should have the power to suspend or disabled users or doctors based on any non-compliant behavior.
- They should have a facility to manage content on the app, including but not limited to promotions, discounts, and alerts.
Conclusion
The relevance of a Doctor on-demand app cannot be more emphasized than right now. When hospital visits which were once taken for granted have now become a luxury that not many can afford, these doctor on-demand applications have adequately filled up for consultations, especially for geriatric patients and people with comorbidities. It would not be surprising if doctor visits become an online affair in the near future.
If you would like to capitalize on this lifestyle change driven business, all you need to do is invest in on-demand doctors app development. However, instead of building the app from scratch, you can consider using white label clones of existing Uber for doctors. These applications are quite easy to customize and can be launched in a very short time.
You can get in touch with an app development company that specializes in customizing Uber for doctors, and they will take care to understand the requirement, customize the app, and have it delivered to you.
