The healthcare industry's evolution has been on track and made healthcare more available and real-time. It has also achieved the compilation to bridge the gap between patients and doctors.
The “Doctor Appointment App” is one of the most significant digitized factors that has made healthcare more hassle-free and accessible.
Digital healthcare IT solutions have enabled the management of functions like cancellations, rebookings, follow-ups, and reminders online. This eliminates all the hassle associated with manual appointment scheduling systems.
Online appointment booking apps have made work easy and created a huge demand in the healthcare sector. This has made it one of the most followed healthcare app ideas and part of the Healthcare mobile app trends.
About Zocdoc
Zocdoc's website and mobile app allow consumers to search for and book appointments with doctors, dentists, therapists, and other medical specialists. Zocdoc has emerged as one of the most promising telemedicine companies during the wake of the pandemic.
With the help of this application, patients can consult with the relevant doctor, receive health tips, and book appointments when it suits them best. This app will provide you with an online directory that lists doctors who specialize in the field you are interested in. You can search for doctors based on their reviews, ratings, experiences, specializations, and reviews.
Zocdoc's appointment scheduling tool is particularly useful for small-practice clinicians and consumers looking for health insurance coverage. The Zocdoc app allows patients to make appointments directly with their clinicians, rather than using complicated tools provided by insurance companies.
It is popular among the patients as it eliminates filling out a pre-appointment form in the waiting area and avoids the hassle of calling the doctor. Patients and healthcare professionals appreciate the Zocdoc appointment process as it requires less administrative work.
How to Build an App Like Zocdoc?
Indeed, the development of the doctor appointment booking app is a complex task and requires a lot of effort and ideas to develop an excellent app. Check out the steps mentioned below to develop a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc:
1. Stay Focused on your Database:
The development of healthcare apps is similar to the development of online doctor appointment apps. From the user’s point of view, you are providing a marketplace for doctors who have the assets or products. Before you start developing your doctor booking app like Zocdoc, make sure you have the asset or product.
It is essential that you have a database of clinics and doctors. If you don't already have one, it is a beneficial idea to immediately start building the database and then proceed with the development process.
2. Confirm your Prototype:
After you have your database set up, it is time to create the prototype for the Zocdoc app. The next step is to create the screen layout for your app and then verify the features. All integrations must be driven by feedback coming from testing users or the medical staff. You can design and develop your app in less time when you verify your Zocdoc app’s prototype.
3. Analyze the Scheduling Tools:
If you are creating a doctor appointment booking app, make sure to grab your off-the-shell scheduling API rather than developing a scheduling engine. Your custom mobile health app development process will be faster if you use an off-the-shelf scheduling API.
4. Work on the UI/UX Design:
Designers need to consider the primary users for whom the app is being created while creating interfaces. This encompasses the design of the admin panel, doctor's panel, and patient's panels. If you want an app like Zocdoc you need to make a user-friendly interface for multiple panels so that the user can take advantage of the doctor appointment app to its fullest.
5. Make Sure HIPPA Compliance:
As you work through the doctor appointment booking app development process, make sure that it is constructed using a secure architecture and is aligned with the HIPPA regulations. HIPPA is designed to protect the patient's confidential information from being stolen or used by unauthorized parties.
Healthcare apps that do not follow HIPPA guidelines can lead to severe penalties. Your development team should be well-versed in the regulatory compliance standards for healthcare and know the best ways to protect the app. These are some things to consider when developing an app for secure on-demand doctor appointments:
- SSL connections
- HITECH Act, GDPR, and other regulations
- HIPAA-as-a-Service cloud platforms
- PHI data encryption
6. Start Testing:
It is obvious that you can't launch a doctor booking app like Zocdoc without thoroughly testing it. The coding sprint should be followed by QA testing. Final testing should include security checks for bugs and glitches.
7. Post-Launch and Release Maintenance:
The final step is to publish the app on the app stores. This will allow users to use the doctor appointment app. Whatsoever, after placing your mobile apps in the stores and shifting the web dashboard to a live server, the work does not stop.
Your app will need to be updated simultaneously in order to support various versions of operating systems and mobile devices. When you update the app, its functionalities will be enhanced and users have a better experience.
Top Features Of the ZocDoc Clone App
Make your doctor booking app stand out among the competitors with fundamental features that make sure a higher rate of user engagement:
1. Profile of Stakeholders:
The doctor booking app consists of two important factors - the doctor and the user profile. The user profile contains basic information such as name, gender, age, and basic health data such as weight, height, blood type, etc. On the other hand, the doctor's profile will include details such as their area of expertise, consultation fees, location of the clinic, etc.
We recommend that the user's profile page be treated as their health record and the doctor's profile page as a section in which everything is included, consisting of their degree, specialization, and clinic image.
2. Search Related to Doctor and Clinic:
Next on the list for doctor appointment app development is the Search option. There must be an option included in the patients' sides of your user group to search for doctors and clinics based on various parameters such as the doctor's or clinic’s name, specialization, wait time, visitation fees, etc. To offer the best service to users, you should have a broad search filter menu.
3. Search Based on Geo-Location:
One more addition to the listing of MVP (Minimal Value Product) features is including a geo-location-based functionality that allows patients to search for clinics and doctors in their local area. To add the location-based search functionality to your doctor appointment booking mobile app, you can use Google Maps and Apple Maps functionality.
This would have the benefit of increasing the usability of your healthcare app and, with it, increasing the session time of your on-demand doctor app.
4. Scheduling an Appointment:
As the name suggests, this feature is one of the necessary Zocdoc app features of your application to search for doctors. You should make the appointment booking feature very simple and user-friendly. It should be easy and hassle-free to find a doctor, confirm a time slot, and book an appointment.
Patients should be able to choose a future date based on their availability. Doctors should also have the ability to accept or decline the appointment in real-time, as per their availability.
5. Doctor Review:
Rating and reviewing doctors is one of the most engaging features of your mobile app. For your healthcare app, you have to make sure that you have many genuine reviews and ratings for your partnered doctors.
Patients will only click on doctors who have positive ratings and reviews. If they see profiles without ratings or reviews, they are less likely to interact with them and the entire app.
You should also offer the option for patients to add media of the clinic’s condition to make it more visible to other patients.
Whereas these features will be counted as must-have MVP features, also there are multiple other features as well that can be included in your application once your MVP has proven your app's viability.
- At-home medical service
- Telemedicine
- Reminder for appointment
- In-built payment
- Patient check-in from the app
Some Advanced Features That Will Influence Cost of Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc
The cost to build a healthcare app like Zocdoc also varies on the advanced features you wish to implement in your app.
- Telemedicine
- Symptom Checker
- Cost Calculator
- Wearable Device Integration
- Cloud-Based Healthcare Solutions
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- Blockchain
Now, that you know how to create a healthcare app like Zocdoc and what features you can include in the Zocdoc app, it is time to move to the point where you can know about the cost to build an app like Zocdoc.
So, without any further ado, the time is here to know how much a doctor booking app like Zocdoc costs.
How much it costs to build a Healthcare Consultation App like Zocdoc?
The average cost to build a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc might range from $40,000 to $50,000. On the other hand, if you are looking to include advanced features such as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), it can cost you somewhere between $100,000 to $150,000.
Rather than investing bucks in developing a doctor appointment app with highly advanced full-fledged doctor appointment booking app features, we would recommend you start with an MVP to see how users are seeing the app and how it is accepted in the market. After that, you can move on to other features. This will make sure that you add value to your users' lives instead of just giving them all at once and then having the same medical app features for life.
Below are some factors that influence the cost of Zocdoc's doctor appointment app.
1. Functionalities and Features:
The features are the first factor that determines the cost of healthcare application development. The cost of your hospital application development will increase, depending on the number of functionalities and features you include in the app. Therefore, you should focus only on the essential features of the app’s initial version. The cost of your healthcare app will increase as the features become more advanced.
2. App Categories:
There are many mobile apps that can be used to help hospitals. Majorly, the cost of each app varies depending on the category. Each category has its own set of features, demographics, security elements, and so on. A healthcare app, for example, must include all features that make it easy to access hospital services for both doctors and patients. When you include all these features after that you get an estimated app’s cost and require more development time.
3. Design and User Interface:
The success of your healthcare apps' depends on their User Interface (UI), and User Experience (UX). It is difficult to create a simple, yet engaging UI/UX app design.
This comes with additional costs. If you want to attract your users long-term, you must integrate UI/UX components like customization, icons, and push notifications.
4. Development Time:
The time spent by healthcare app developers building an app for the hospital plays a critical role in determining the cost of an application. The number of developers needed to build a hospital app directly affects the time it takes. If you have chosen to include complex features in your app and wish that it takes less development time, then you must hire more skilled professionals to achieve the targeted results.
If you are looking for a basic team then you have to pay less than the above-mentioned cost.
5. Choice of App Development Company:
Also, your choice of application development company will impact the cost of your hospital app. Reliable hospital app development company has expertise in different areas and can offer out-of-the-box services. It will increase your app development cost, but not compromise the quality of the service and speed up the development process. However, it will increase the cost of your app development, but it will not compromise the quality of service thus accelerating your development process.
Hire Vidhema Technologies as your Doctor Appointment App Development Company
Healthcare applications have outshined around the globe, ensuring a bright future for the healthcare industry. With this blog, we have tried to cover mainly all the stats and facts that would help you estimate the cost to build an app like Zocdoc.
The right and skillful mobile app development company can provide the best healthcare software development solutions that will help you accelerate your business standards. Catch with our experts today to make a healthcare app like Zocdoc.
Frequently Asked Questions
A lot of people don't appreciate the moment until it’s passed. I'm not trying my hardest, and I'm not trying to do
While making the appointments with Zocdoc it is 100 percent free for patients.
Zocdoc was established in New York City by Nick Ganju, Oliver Kharraz and Cyrus Massoumi in 2007. The company's first CEO was Cyrus Massoumi. Cofounders Kharraz and Massoumi met while working as consultants at McKinsey.
The average cost to build a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc might range from $40,000 to $50,000. And, if you are looking to include advanced features such as artificial intelligence, it can cost you somewhere between $100,000 to $150,000.
About Author
Riddhi Shah
Riddhi is a Digital Marketing Executive at Vidhema Technologies. With expertise in marketing, social media, and design, she also possesses adept skills in writing blogs and articles for different niches. Riddhi has a qualitative and innovative approach to her work.