How to Improve the Overall User Experience of A Doctor Appointment Booking App

The increasing usage of mobile apps has brought revolutionary changes in a variety of sectors, including ecommerce, banking, healthcare and so on. If we talk about the healthcare industry specifically, the evolution of innovative MedTech solutions has also led to rapid technological advancements in this domain. The best one of them is the evolution of doctor appointment booking app.  The usage of a doctor on-demand app is offering new ways to make an appointment with medical experts for patients. Contact the top mobile app development company to help you in designing the best apps.

Why Use Doctor Appointment App for your Healthcare Facility

Majority of the people today are relying on their smartphones for getting medical assistance, right from planning doctor visits, medication pickup, consultation to all sorts of other activities that are related to their health and wellbeing. Modern-day tech-savvy, digital customers are also getting inclined towards healthcare providers, offering digital capabilities like telemedicine, video conferencing, e-prescriptions and so on.

According to an Accenture Report of 2019, the option to book a medical consultation online is 4th in the priority list of people when they choose a medical provider. Hence, the facility of booking doctor appointments online plays a crucial role in improving customer satisfaction with certain medical services for healthcare providers.

You, as a medical service provider, can understand it simply: when you give the option to book a doctor appointment online to patients, you are likely to get higher customer satisfaction. Everything is about efficiency and saving time and if we can save the user some time they will keep using the app.This is because most of the customers believe that they are going to get the best of modern care with a healthcare provider who offers advanced facilities like telemedicine, online doctor appointment and so on.

Challenges Related to Mobile App Development in Healthcare Industry

In 2017, there were around 318,000 mHealth apps on the world app stores and this number is increasing by 200 every day. However, the majority of such apps fail to succeed in the market due to their inability to solve common user issues in the industry.

So, here is a list of issues that you must consider while developing a healthcare mobile app:

• Try to solve the specific problem of your target audience. Many healthcare apps try to incorporate a wide range of services for their users but eventually fails to deliver all of them properly.
• Since healthcare is pretty sensitive and strict when it comes to user privacy, make sure your healthcare app meets all privacy and security standards. For example, while developing a healthcare app in the US, comply with HIPAA regulations to protect sensitive patient health information.
• Put your focus on application usability. Today users don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use an Android App or iOS app. According to a study, only 10% of healthcare applications satisfy the requirement of users. Hence, while working on the development mode, it is essential to identify the different elements or features of a healthcare app that are essential for users to improve their overall experience.

Essential Features to Improve User Experience of A Doctor On Demand App

Here are the essential features that a customer would definitely like to see in your doctor appointment booking app for great user experience:

Easy Registration and User Profile Creation

There are two important aspects of on-demand doctor app development that helps in enhancing user visibility. Frankly speaking, people today don’t like to create user profiles or spend a lot of time filling their personal details. But, as we know healthcare is a personalized services sector, you can’t let customers miss filling important profile details.

So, the best on-demand app development company is always the one who keeps this aspect in mind and tries to keep things minimal for users when it comes to entering profile details. Patients should enter the minimum, but essential information (that tells about their health profile), including name, sex, age, address, insurance, etc. on a doctor appointment app.

Customized Search Facility

This feature can be categorized into parts – scheduling and searching. As an Android app development agency, make sure you provide the right option to schedule a doctor appointment to users. Nothing difficult – just add an interactive calendar where they can select the date of appointment along with time via one-tap facility (see example below).

Now, to make the search process more precise for users, you can add a range of filtering and sorting tools that enables users to find an appropriate doctor on the basis of criteria like doctor speciality, price, location, etc.

Doctor Profile

As an android app development company, you should also focus on the doctor’s profile in an on-demand app. Focus on developing an application that covers doctors’ profiles entirely.

Generally, an effective doctor profile should contain the following details:

• The location of the doctor’s medical facility (along with distance calculation from patient location)
• Doctor speciality, experience and professional certifications
• Reviews from other registered and verified users
• Photos of workplace

Appointment Booking Functionality

Once, you are done with setting up the basic features related to user profile creation in your doctor appointment app, focus on the most important functionality of your app – setting up an appointment. To deliver seamless user experience, make sure there are no errors when clients make an appointment request via the app

Tips to improve the user experience while they set up a doctor appointment via your app:

• Add a chatting feature, so users can clear doubts related with doctors about the upcoming meet-up.
• Add in-app notification functionality to remind users about upcoming appointments.
• Add a fully-functional calendar that provides a detailed list of all upcoming appointments to users.

Payment Gateway Integration

As a custom mobile app development service provider, don’t forget to set up a robust payment system in the doctor appointment app, similar to the ones integrated into an ecommerce website solution or application. Integration of payment gateway supports your app monetization model and provides flexibility to users who prefer making online payments.

To avoid losing patience and deliver a great user experience at this stage, try to make the payment process faster, easier and secure for patients.

• For faster payments (add instant one-touch payments, minimize processing time, etc.)
• For easier payments (add functionalities like saved card, repeat order, etc.)
• For secure payments (choose reliable payments processing partner, enable customer biometric, fingerprint or face recognition, geo-location factoring, PCI DSS security, etc.)

Navigation and Geolocation Functionality

An in-app guide to a doctor’s office or geolocation feature is great to enhance the overall user experience of a doctor on-demand app. Of course, people can use Google Maps to reach their doctor clinic today for a consultation. But, having such a feature is a great advantage for improving user delight. Even the best app development companies in the US and across the globe are incorporating this feature in their client apps.

Online Video Conferencing/Telemedicine Capacity

It’s obvious to know that a visit to a doctor’s place consumes a lot of patient time due to additional travel. Many people have agreed to the idea of getting a doctor consultation without having to visit their clinic or hospital. This is where video conferencing via a doctor appointment app can come in handy. So, add the video conferencing facility to your app to attract more customers.

E-prescription Feature

A doctor appointment app must have the functionality where doctors can prescribe the required medicines along with the receipts to patients directly in the app. This makes it easy for patients to order the prescriptions from their nearby local pharmacies online.

Chat or Messenger Module

This feature is invaluable to patients to have a quick consultation with a doctor or clinicians, listed on the app itself. Having chat functionality also makes it easier for patients to discuss additional issues, ask quick questions or specify the information to medical experts.

Wrapping Up..!

The above list covers some important features that makes doctor appointments easy for users with an on-demand mobile application. By partnering with an expert android and iOS app development company like A3logics, you can incorporate such features and make sure nothing is missed in your on-demand app.

Our mobile app development experts can join you as a reliable partner to build scalable, powerful and enterprise-grade mobile app solutions as per your business requirements. Contact us to know more about our app development services.