Medical practices are turning to telemedicine and telehealth since the rise of virtual care. Extended lockdowns and social distancing have converted physical doctor visits to virtual visits. Many traditional healthcare businesses and hospitals have added telemedicine to their offerings, to cater to patients across geographies.
If you are also thinking about starting a telehealth/telemedicine business that can reduce wait time, increase customers’ loyalty, and generate more revenue, this is the best time. You do not require significant investment and can easily set up a telemedicine business in no time.
Hiring a telemedicine software provider will ensure that your telehealth platform is built with the key features and as per the latest technology trends. Alongside, you must also know some best practices before starting a telemedicine business.
Plan and write your goals
Firstly, you must write everything related to your telemedicine business. They could be:
- What will be the nature of your business?
- Who are your competitors?
- How will you differ from the competitors?
- What is your budget against each line item?
- How are you going to spend on IT, customer service, infrastructure, marketing, sales, and office?
- How are you going to measure customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention?
- Do you have a monetization plan?
- What will be your policies related to no-shows, cancellations, wait times?
- What will be your support and refund policy?
- Do you have any references in mind for features and design?
The answers to the above questions in writing will help you in the development of your telemedicine platform for doctors easily.
Call us to know how telemedicine platforms can increase your revenue.
6 Things to remember while developing your telemedicine software solution
1. Understand government regulations and healthcare security standards
Understand the policies and regulations around a healthcare business in your country. Policies also differ by state and you must know policies like Medicare/Medicaid and commercial plans.
There are state and federal policies related to reimbursements in the telemedicine segment. You should collect all this information and include it in a document. You can show it to an auditor or legal expert and take their opinion to ensure that your healthcare software features are developed keeping the regulations and procedure in mind.
Along with the regulations, you must also pay attention to HIPAA, HL7, PCI-DSS, GDPR, security encryption, and cyber-attacks.
Ask your telemedicine software providers for case studies related to the geography you are targeting and the regulatory compliances the software development agency follows.
2. Decide your telemedicine utilization strategy
You can offer text, voice, and video consultation based on your business approach. For example – you can offer video consultation during non-office hours and text consultation for most of the day. You can also do follow-up calls by video as video calls are reimbursable.
The telemedicine platform for doctors should have features such as online payments, appointment scheduling, secure communication and EMR/EHR records among many others.
3. Staff involvement
As a telemedicine solutions provider, it is important to involve staff in ideation and brainstorming sessions and know what can go wrong and the risks in the business. You will get useful information that can help you prepare in advance. You can create a group of people responsible for various tasks like providers, appointment schedulers, technical resources, clinical nurses, business consultants, and shape the healthcare start-up in a way that success is guaranteed and risks can be minimal.
Schedule your first call with Knovator Technologies to know more about resource allocation for software development.
4. Marketing and sales strategy
Another critical element is deciding your sales and marketing strategy. This can be broken down into long-term and short-term goals along with the ROI, KPI metrics and benchmarks.
PPC ads or paid social media marketing could be short-term healthcare marketing strategies to bring leads to your website/app. Blogging, SEO, content marketing and email marketing give long-term returns.
For example, you can onboard a content expert to craft engaging and effective stories. A medical expert can fact-check what is written. An SEO expert can then optimize the right keywords. Google has high standards for content related to healthcare.
Ideas for inspiration are: ZocDoc launched ZocTrends to reveal interesting data on patient behavior. Doctor on Demand has a report on The State of Primary Care in America. You can steadily educate patients with helpful advice, analysis and resources.
Moreover, you must decide on your inside sales, direct sales, and online sales strategy and the need for the staff to implement the healthcare marketing strategy.
5. Plan features
You must plan features for both patients and doctors. For patients, you can decide if you want to provide SMS, social media, and mobile-based registration or just email registration. You can also discuss integration with prior authorization or the EMR system with the option for patients to upload records. For search, you can provide both basic and advanced search features based on proximity, rating, popularity, online availability, symptoms, and specialty.
Along with this, you can decide if you wish to offer video consultation as you will require technology and infrastructure efforts for the same. Online payment gateways, rating systems, chatbots, and automation features should be planned in advance.
So, now as you are aware of the features and practices behind the development of a telemedicine platform for doctors and patients, let’s discuss an important aspect that is cost.
6. What will be the approximate cost of bootstrapping a telemedicine business?
If you want to develop everything from scratch or in other words looking for a telemedicine software providers to code from scratch, you have to spend at least $50,000. You can delegate the development and support work to Knovator Technology and we will tailor your budget by selecting the best set of features for your telemedicine business.
Custom software development is ideal for telemedicine business models and provides you with more flexibility, scalability, and robustness in terms of features expansion. It can be costly but will be worth the effort.
If you are looking for a low-budget solution, you can go for healthcare MVP development that will cost you $20,000 and will take less time to launch. MVP will contain basic and essential features and you can work with Knovator Technology to design UI/UX with innovation and simplification in mind.
If you plan to offer a telemedicine platform for doctors and patients that is a replica of current systems or a white-label solution, it will cost you $15,000. However, it will come with limitations like the platform being similar to other telemedicine software available in the market.
Related : Telemedicine App Development Services
Conclusion
The need for telemedicine software providers is only going to increase. If you’re looking to add digital transformation services to your hospital like telemedicine software or mobile apps, now is the best time.
With a telemedicine software providers like Knovator Technology, you can rest assured that your project will be in safe hands. We’ve developed and delivered telemedicine platforms for doctors that are scalable and robust. Building a healthcare business requires knowledge about regulatory guidelines along with technical expertise. And our software development team is well-versed with all aspects of healthcare IT solutions, right from prototyping, MVP, design to development.
We’ve helped businesses like yours expand, increase ROI and earn more revenue. Call us for the first free demo.
