How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Doctor Appointment App Like ZocDoc?

The evolution track that the mobilized healthcare economy has placed the industry on has not just made healthcare more accessible and real-time but has also achieved the complication of bridging the gap between the patients and doctors.

One of the biggest contributory digitized factors behind this movement that has made healthcare more hassle-free and accessible than ever before is the doctor appointment app.

The way the digital healthcare IT solutions industry is moving has now made it possible to handle functionalities like bookings, cancellations, re-booking, follow-ups, and reminders online, crossing all the fuss linked with manual appointment schedule systems.

The ease that online appointment booking apps offer has brought in an unprecedented demand for the healthcare category from all the different stakeholders of the healthcare domain, thus making it an important part of the healthcare mobile app trends and one of the most followed healthcare app ideas.

Market Overview of Doctor Appointment Apps like Zocdoc

The ease of booking and monitoring that the doctor appointment application offer has made them a prime category in the healthcare and fitness mobile app development domain.

According to a recent survey, 

• 25% of patients prefer to book appointments online 
• 72% of patients and 60% of healthcare professionals say online booking platforms encourage patients to keep appointments 
• 52% of people utilize their smartphones for health-related queries
• 40% of physicians now consider digital healthcare technology as one of the most impactful reasons that have decreased the number of patient visits to the doctor’s chamber

The online doctor consultation market segment worldwide is estimated to reach a valuation of $21.9 billion in 2022. By 2027, the market is expected to reach a valuation of $35.41 billion by growing at a CAGR of 10.01%. 

These stats prove why your hospital needs a mobile application for scheduling appointments.

With the constant attention and heightened acceptance from all the stakeholders of the healthcare economy and the investors, there are a few doctor appointment booking apps like Zocdoc that have established themselves as market leaders.

Steps to Build a Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc

The doctor appointment booking app development is indeed a complex task and takes a lot of effort and ideas to build an excellent app. Check out the steps to develop a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc:

Get Ready with your Database

The development of healthcare apps is analogous to online doctor appointment app development. From the user’s viewpoint, you are offering a marketplace for the doctors who are the products or assets. So first, you need to ensure that you have the product or asset before you go for your doctor booking app development like Zocdoc.

You must be ready with the database of doctors and clinics. In case you don’t have one, you should immediately start creating the database and then move on with the development process.

Verify your Prototype

Once you have got your database ready, the next step is to develop the prototype for your Zocdoc app. You need to start with building the visuals of your app screen and verify the features. The driving force of all the integrations should be the feedback coming from the test users or the medical staff. Verifying the app’s prototype will help you in designing and developing your app in less time.

Review the Scheduling Tools

When you create a doctor appointment scheduling app, be sure to pick up your off-the-shell scheduling API instead of developing a scheduling engine. Using an off-the-shell scheduling API will speed up your custom mobile app development process. 

Work on the UI/UX Design

While creating interfaces for your app users, designers need to keep in mind the primary groups for which they are creating the app. This includes designs for the patient’s panel, doctor’s panel, and admin panel. To design app like Zocdoc, you need to create a user-friendly interface for different panels so that the user can utilize the doctor appointment app to the fullest.

Ensure HIPPA Compliance

As you go through your doctor appointment booking app development process, you need to ensure that the app is built using a secured architecture and is aligned with the HIPPA regulations. HIPPA protects critical information of the patients from being leaked out to unauthorized parties. 

Healthcare apps that do not follow HIPPA guidelines are imposed huge fines. Ensure that your development team has full knowledge about the regulatory compliance standards for healthcare and knows the best ways to secure the app. Consider these few things for a secured on demand doctor appointment app development:

• SSL connections
• PHI data encryption
• HITECH Act, GDPR, and other regulations
• HIPAA-as-a-Service cloud platforms

Bonus Read- How to Develop a HIPAA Compliant Mobile Application 

Initiate Testing

Of course, you cannot launch your doctor booking app like Zocdoc without testing it thoroughly. QA testing should be done simultaneously with the coding process, thus following the development sprint. However, the final testing should cover everything, including security tests for glitches and bugs.

Release and Post-Launch Maintenance

The final step is to release the app on the app stores allowing the users to utilize the doctor appointment app. However, things do not end after adding your mobile apps to the stores and moving the web dashboard to a live server. 

You will need to update your app simultaneously so that it can support different versions of mobile devices and other operating systems. Updating the app would enhance its functionalities and offer your users a great experience.

Key Features to Include in your Doctor Appointment App

Make your doctor appointment app stand out in the crowd with core features that ensures a higher rate of user engagement:

Stakeholders’ Profiles

The doctor appointment app includes two main sections – doctor and user profile. The user profile includes the user’s name, age, gender, and basic health data like weight, height, blood group, etc. The doctor’s profile, on the other hand, will have details like their area of specialization, location of the clinic, consultation charges, etc. 

We would advise treating the user’s profile page as their personal health chart and the doctor’s profile page as a section where everything, including their degree, specialization, and clinic photo, is present. 

Doctor and Clinic Search

The next must-have feature for doctor appointment app development is the Search option. Your patients’ side of the user group should be given an option to search for doctors and clinics based on different parameters like the specialization, the clinic’s or doctor’s name, the wait time, visitation charges, etc. Opt for having a wide search filter menu to offer the best services to the users.

Geo-Location Based Search

Another addition to the list of MVP (Minimal Viable Product) features would be adding a geo-location-based functionality to enable patients to look for doctors and clinics in their area of residence or work. You can make use of Google and Apple Map functionality to add the location-based search feature to your doctor appointment booking mobile application.

The benefit of this would be that the usability factor of your healthcare app would increase manifold, and with it, the session time of your on-demand doctor app.

Appointment Booking

The feature, as it goes without saying, is one of the most basic Zocdoc app features of your app to find doctors. The appointment booking feature that you are adding should belong to a very simple interface, where the whole process of finding a doctor and confirming a time slab for booking the appointment is very easy and hassle-free.

You should give the patients the option to select a future date according to their availability while giving the doctors the functionality to accept or reject the appointment in real-time as per their availability.

Doctor Review

Doctors’ rating and review is the one feature that will make the patient side of the users get engaged with your mobile app. For your healthcare app, you will have to ensure that you have a good lot of genuine ratings and reviews for your partnered doctors.

The case with doctor appointment apps is that the patients only click on those doctors’ profiles who have a good set of ratings and reviews backing them. So, in case they find profiles with no ratings and reviews, chances are that they won’t interact with those doctors and, ultimately, with the app as a whole.

Apart from this, you should also provide the option to add media to enable them to add the condition of the clinic for other patients to view.

While these are the features that will form a part of the must-have or MVP features, there are a number of other features that can be added as a part of your application on a future date once the MVP has proved your app’s viability.

• Telemedicine
• Patient check-in from the app
• At-home medical service
• In-built payment
• Reminder for appointments

Now that you know how to create a healthcare app like Zocdoc with the features mentioned above, it is time to look into the advanced features that can be incorporated to give you a competitive edge among the hundreds of doctor appointment online apps mushrooming in the market.

Advanced Features Influencing the Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc Cost

The cost to develop a healthcare app like Zocdoc also depends on the advanced features you plan to implement in your app. Let us check them one by one:

Telemedicine

Even though including the telemedicine feature in your doctor appointment scheduling app will be a worthy decision but adding this will lift up the cost to develop a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc. Telemedicine allows long-distance patients and doctors to connect with each other without an in-person visit. Telemedicine technology is mainly utilized for follow-ups with doctors for the management of chronic conditions.

Symptom Checker

Health issues surrounding the Covid-19 virus are currently spreading all over the globe and are creating panic among people. With the help of advanced AI-based assistants, users can make a quick diagnosis of their symptoms, based on which they can decide if they require consultation or not. Ensure that your online doctor booking app has an in-built symptom checker feature that would advise the users to connect with doctors in case the severity level is high.

Cloud-Based Healthcare Solutions

Cloud service features in your doctor appointment app will also help streamline communication with efficient processing and storage. Cloud computing services in the healthcare app not just allow the patient to access information from anywhere and anytime but also brings in other benefits like health data analytics. 

Bonus Read-Applications of cloud computing in healthcare 

Cost Calculator 

To increase the chances of your app’s success, implementing the cost calculator will be a logical decision. The in-app cost calculator will allow the patients to understand and know the breakdown of the healthcare services that they are being charged it. 

Wearable Device Integration

The cost to build a healthcare app like Zocdoc also depends on what type of wearable devices you’re integrating your app with. Offering the feature of wearable device integration to your healthcare app will allow the users to monitor their health and get the data stored and synced within the application. 

In this way, they can regularly monitor their blood sugar levels, heart rate, and blood pressure and keep a check on other health parameters. Also, they can keep a record of the same in their application. 

Our development experts at Appinventiv have worked on an app called Health-e-People that just does the same. This app allows users to create detailed healthcare records. Health-e-People is a platform where they can store and monitor their healthcare apps, find caregivers or any sort of medical assistance, and connect with people to build a community.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Doctor appointment booking apps like ZocDoc use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to a huge extent to make searches more relevant.

What happens is that the general users don’t know the specialized names like Ophthalmologist or Oncologist, but what they understand is Eye doctor or Cancer specialist, or at times they make queries in more layman terms like doctors for blurred vision, etc.

In a case like this, when you integrate machine learning in your app, you are able to match the patients to the right doctor with much ease.

Blockchain

The impact of blockchain on the healthcare ecosystem has streamlined healthcare operations in many ways. Blockchain for healthcare is used for creating a decentralized and secure platform for storing medical records. 

Blockchain will help bring all the data into one decentralized system, which will only be accessible by those who have access to it, thus eliminating the instance of data or appointment detail leaks. Also, the patients from within your side of the healthcare app for patients will be able to check their insurance claim details before booking a doctor’s appointment – something that will help them connect with only those doctors or clinics that are a part of their insurance umbrella. 

Technology Stack in Doctor Appointment App Development

When it comes to doctor appointment mobile app development, then it is always recommended to choose the best technology stack that can deliver a robust and scalable performance. The tech stack in online doctor scheduling app development varies depending upon the complexity of the project and the number of features that you want to implement. However, here is the basic set of technology stacks that you will require to build a healthcare app.

• Front-end development: ReactJS, Angular
• Back-end development: PHP, Node.js, Phyton; database — Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL
• Multiple payment modes: PayPal, Stripe, Braintree
• Mobile development: iOS — Swift, Android — Java
• Map integration: Google Maps API, CoreLocation, MapKit
• In-app calling and messaging: Twilio
• Push notifications: Twilio, Push.io
• Cloud environment: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft Azure.

With this, we have now seen all – The market for doctor appointment online apps, the features set that will mark its success, and the technologies that will make your mobile app for finding doctors truly next-gen. The time has now come to look into how much a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc costs.

Cost to Develop Doctor Appointment App like Zocdoc

The average cost to develop a doctor appointment app might range from $40,000 to $50,000. If you are looking to add advanced features like artificial intelligence, it can cost somewhere between $100,000 to $150,000. 

What we would recommend is that instead of investing money in the name of doctor appointment app development cost for making a highly advanced full-fledged doctor appointment booking app, start with an MVP – see how it is being accepted in the market, and then expand to adding other healthcare app features. This would ensure that you are constantly adding some value to the users’ life instead of giving them everything up front and then being with the same set of medical app features forever.

A few factors that affect the cost of developing a doctor appointment app like Zocdoc are given below: 

1. Features and Functionalities

The initial factor that decides the hospital application development cost is the features. The more features and functionalities your hospital application has, the more cost you need to invest in your hospital application development. So, make sure you focus only on the core features in the app’s initial version. As the features get advanced, the cost of your hospital app also increases.

2. Categories of App

There are numerous mobile apps for hospitals, and the cost of each app depends on its category majorly. Each category has its own demographics, functionalities, security element, etc. For example, developing a hospital app must have all the features to make hospital services easily accessible to both doctors and patients. All such features add to the final estimated cost of the app and need more development time.

3. User Interface and Design

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UI) are crucial for the success of your hospital applications. Developing a simple yet unique and engaging UI/UX app design is challenging.  It involves certain additional costs. UI/UX components such as push notifications, icons, and customization must be integrated into your application if you wish to entice your targeted users in the long run.

4. Development Time

The total time hospital app developers take to build a hospital app plays a critical role in deciding the app cost. The time taken to develop a hospital app is directly related to the number of developers required. If your app has complex features and you want less development time, then you need more smart professionals to achieve the tasks quickly.

Whereas, if you want a basic team, you need to pay less than the above. 

5. Choice of App Development Company

The cost of your hospital app will also depend on the application development company you hire to develop it. A reliable hospital app development company has expertise in multiple domains and offers skilled resources to deliver out-of-the-box services. However, it will add to your app development costs, but the quality of service will not be compromised, and it will accelerate the development process.

Let Appinventiv be your Doctor Appointment App Development Company

Healthcare applications today have outshined globally and ensure a promising future. In this blog, we have tried covering the major stats and facts that would help you to estimate the cost to develop a healthcare app like Zocdoc. 

The right choice of the mobile app development team can offer you the best healthcare software development services that can overall level up your business standards. Connect with our experts today and create a healthcare app like Zocdoc.

FAQs

Q. Which platform to go with first?

A. The answer to this would lie with your demographics. If your user group belongs to western nations, go with iOS. If you are planning to expand your bases all over the world, go with Android. 

What we would recommend is investing in react native-powered healthcare mobile app development and getting the app on both Android and iOS to make the most of both platforms.

Q. How will I manage the doctor’s listing?

A. As an app admin, you will be given a separate profile from which you will be able to add the doctors’ listings along with several other details. You can also remove a doctor from the app or edit their information. 

Q. Should I develop a web app as well?

A. While not at the beginning, it would help greatly to expand into the PWA domain once you have steady traffic coming in. This would only take your app to a million other users at a very minimal price, all the while bringing down the cost of developing a doctor appointment booking app.

Q. How to add trust to the app?

A. There are many ways to make your app an element of trust. 

• Get accredited and add badges of reputed healthcare standard bodies in the app.
• Add a multi-factor authentication system at all stages – Log in, Payment, Social Sharing, etc. 
• Aim at adding real photos, videos, and reviews of the doctors you associate with.

Q. How long does it take to build an app like Zocdoc?

A. The time taken to build a healthcare app depends on the complexity of the app and the structure of the project. On average, it takes three to nine months to develop a doctor appointment booking app. Each stage of the development process needs a different amount of time to complete.

THE AUTHOR

Dileep Gupta

DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER