Develop Your E-Pharmacy App with Industry Experts | Features, Steps, More

Since March 2020, how many times have you ordered medicines online? Several times, isn’t it? E-Pharmacy is the need of the hour and thanks to technology advancements, you can own an E-Pharmacy and sell medicines online.

To do this, you need the services of a telemedicine app development company. Let’s discuss important statistics supporting this statement.

As per a report, the global online or E-Pharmacy business is expected to grow at a rate of 20% by 2025. This shows that now is a good time to start an online pharmacy business. As an internet-based vendor, you can sell medicines and also provide online lab test booking facilities. In an e-Pharmacy patients or customers can download your app or visit your website, search for medicine and then upload their prescription and place an order.

Once the prescription content is verified, the medicine order is packed and shipped to the customer. Once an order is delivered, an invoice is generated automatically and available on the website or app account page. Many other options like refilling, uploading multiple prescriptions, order tracking, prescription rejection, and address management increase the value proposition of an online pharmacy app.

It’s important to note that online pharmacy stores also abide by government regulations and you cannot order medicine without valid prescriptions. To some extent, online pharmacy stores also extend to provide telehealth and telemedicine services. Patients or customers can order their medicine by consulting with a primary or specialty doctor and placing an order for their medicines.

You must consult with a healthcare app development company like Knovator Technologies if your business model is going to include telemedicine, telehealth, and remote patient monitoring also.

Before going further, have a look at the guide on how to launch your telehealth startup effectively.

If you are thinking about medical records and payments security, here are the benefits of developing an online pharmacy app.

1. HIPAA and HL7 compliant

A healthcare app development company follows HIPAA, HL7, SSL protocol to meet healthcare and website/app security. Apple and Google Play store does not accept apps without meeting security protocols.

2. Better pricing

Online pharmacy stores always provide the best pricing comparison and discounts as there is no 3rd party involved here. Customers do not have to go to medical stores, inquire about medicine and go to another store if one medicine is not available in the previous store. Customers living in remote areas can also order resulting in lower transaction costs and more satisfaction

3. Doorstep delivery

Customers place an order and medicines are delivered right at their doorstep. It helps in managing customers’ time as they do not have to travel to a pharmacy

4. Maintain privacy

Buying sensitive medicine in a physical store can be embarrassing for customers. An online pharmacy encourages them to buy without worrying about it.

5. Get the right information

Customers can review the latest healthcare medicine information and also search for a substitute if original medicine is not available.

6. Long-term prescription filling

Customers can opt for monthly or quarterly or a custom subscription to receive medicines without ordering again.

7. Is the prescription not with you? No problem

In case you do not have a prescription, a few online pharmacy stores connect you with a doctor to get a valid prescription. You can upload these prescriptions and order your medicines.

Now, you must be feeling confident about entering into the online pharmacy store business. So, what features you must have in an online pharmacy store. The best way to find out the list of features is to consult a seasoned healthcare app development company like Knovator Technologies.

Related : Healthcare Mobile App Development

Let’s explore features for patients/customers and pharmacies.

For customers or patients

Profile

This is the first step for a customer or patient to enter their information and create a profile. As soon as they visit your site or app, they have to log in using mobile phone OTP authentication or user-id/password

Prescription Management

Patients can request a prescription or scan and upload prescriptions in the profile section

Search

Users can search for a medication by name, prices, availability, location, and type of condition. They can further sort the list by price, alphabetical order, and click on a medication page to view its salt content, images, information and more.

Attach prescription, purchase, and tracking

Patients can select a number of strips, attach prescriptions from the profile, and place a one-time or recurring order by selecting a payment mode [Credit, Debit, and PayPal]. They receive an email/SMS confirmation with an order tracking link. They also receive updates on various order stages starting from prescription verification, rejection and re-upload/connect to a doctor, order processing, and delivery with delivery personnel number.

Help section

Patients can start a chat request or submit a request to get instant help. They should also have access to refunds and other policies. You should provide an FAQ section to ensure app credibility is maintained.

Related : Patient Engagement Solutions

For pharmacy admin or super admin

Medication management

Pharmacy admin can create medications or upload a list of medications from excel. They can enter a name, images, inventory, price per subscription plan and discount coupon.

Dashboard and reports

Pharmacy admin will be able to view a dashboard with a number and graph-wise representation of the number of orders pending, medications low in inventory, request inquiries pending, and other important stats to help them in their daily job. Along with this, the admin can also extract reports related to orders, requests, medications, subscriptions, delivery, CRM, and delayed order reports or in transit delivery and perform analysis to improve business efficiency.

Customer CRM management

Customer relationship management (CRM) enables the admin to view complete customer or patient information with their medications, doctor name, prescription, orders, communication details, and other information. You can offer users loyalty or discounts for a particular patient or customer segment for customer retention.

Order management

Order management is the core part of the admin application. It helps to track orders in various stages categorized into tabs – order received, order verified, order rejected, order processed, the order in transit, order delivered, order not delivered, rejected by a customer due to packaging, re-shipped, and completed status. Every tab will have the status and along with it the number of orders in that status.

Delivery management

Admin can view current delivery and track delivery personnel. They can also create, edit, view, and delete delivery personnel with their document for audit purposes.

Pharmacy admin management

A super admin can create multiple pharmacies and manage their subscription plans

Subscription management

You can create multiple subscriptions and also manage their plan, pricing, duration, and can choose to disable, edit or delete it.

Email management

Using an email management feature, an admin user can send emails to any user and also receive emails from support or another user.

For delivery personnel

Delivery personnel can log in and track their orders and view the delivery location also.

Miscellaneous features

Doctors can create their schedules and provide in-app consultations in the app. Patients can connect with care providers and doctors using the chat function.

The multi-language chat is also a good feature to have. You need to ensure to rely on professional translators and not Google Translate as it will give wrong and inconsistent results.

Related : Benefits of Buy Hospital Automated Prior Authorization Solution

5 Steps to successful telemedicine app development for your online pharmacy business

Thinking about how to get these features developed and what will work best for your startup? You can review the following 5 standard steps with Knovator Technology – a telemedicine app development that can tailor these steps for your online pharmacy business.

Step 1 – Market analysis

First, it is important to do a competitor analysis and create a table of features present in each of them. You can then use search engine marketing experts to create a blueprint of their success factors. Offline surveys can help you find out the real challenges and problems and how these startups are solving them.

Additionally, hire marketing experts who will provide you with a detailed report of keywords, search trends, ad pricing for these keywords, and other information to plan your marketing budget ahead of development. You can also plan development work based on marketing and content strategy.

The pages should be designed taking into consideration UI/UX/content marketing strategy so that every page or app screen contains information and Call to action buttons required as per customers’ or patients’ expectations.

Step 2 – MVP development

Never go for the full cycle development of your app. Knovator Technologies recommends that you must develop a minimal viable product and use it for testing and customers’ feedback purposes. Healthcare MVP development is instrumental in evaluating and planning future sprints of development and marketing plan.

Step 3 – Hire a healthcare app development company like Knovator Technologies

You cannot hire a company that does not have experience in healthcare app development. You need to evaluate if the custom healthcare software development company has full stack experience in delivering healthcare IT applications ranging from EMR, remote patient monitoring, telemedicine apps, mobile apps and EHR/EMR integration systems.

Step 4 – Hire a dedicated technical team

Both mobile and app development requires a different skill set and you need to ensure that your telemedicine app development has resources and experience in delivering native web and mobile applications. Hire a dedicated technical team to ensure that iPhone and android applications are native and not hybrid so that the apps can provide a smooth experience on mobile phones.

Step 5 –Launch and maintenance

Post-launch, regular software maintenance, server maintenance, and security audits are required for the smooth functioning of your apps. You must hire a support engineer so that it can do these activities and also log a ticket for software bugs and help you resolve and keep the business up and running.

Related : Telemedicine App Development Services

What are the costs associated with online pharmacy healthcare app development?

How much does it take to build an online pharmacy healthcare app starts from $14,000. The pricing increases based on the features and the support plan. However, you can monetize your application through in-app consultations, lab test booking, medications selling and health plan selling through your app to recover costs.

Healthcare startups are doing well: Top 2 apps that are helping patients

Nurx

Nurx provides specialized healthcare by connecting medical teams to patients at their convenience. Along with providing services in all the medical areas like medication prescription, lab tests for HPV, Covid-19, skincare, birth control, they also provide doorstep services at affordable rates. You get unlimited conversations with providers and free shipping

Walmart Pharmacy

Online pharmacy app Walmart Pharmacy has revolutionized telemedicine app development with seamless prescription management. The key features of this 24-hour pharmacy delivery and medicine app are – order tracking, smart search and substitutes, refilling prescriptions, medical reminder alerts and booking lab tests and consultation facilities among many others.

It’s time to connect with telemedicine and healthcare app development like Knovator Technology. Seize the opportunity to discuss and create your online pharmacy app with open integration to other healthcare systems to expand your horizon. Let’s begin today!