Physician Wellness Apps: Developing and Investing in Solutions for Healthcare Professionals

In today’s digital-first era, there’s a mobile or web application for literally everything. Whether you want to plan your taxes or learn a foreign language, you open any major app store, and there they are – apps for anything you wish.

As for mHealth, there are over 350,000 healthcare and medical apps across all app stores. And physician wellness apps take a separate seat among them.

But is investing in wellness apps for healthcare professionals worthwhile? What types of apps for doctors’ wellness (well-being) should you consider? More importantly, how to build such an app from scratch?

This guide will give you all the answers and walk you through the whole app development process. So, let’s get into it.

Why Invest in Wellness Apps for Doctors

Investment in physician health and wellness apps yields results in the following.

Keeping up with digital transformation and innovation

Switching to telehealth amid the COVID-19 outbreak, more and more healthcare professionals embraced the virtual environment as a new norm. And there’s no turning back.

Innovative technologies and digital transformation sped up the development of mHealth apps. The only way to stay competitive is to jump on this wave and ride it successfully.

Targeting younger generations

Besides Millennials, it’s time to invest in a new generation of physicians – Generation Z. They are the so-called “ultra-mobile doctors” with a closer relation to the digital world. They seek more flexibility and adaptability, which can also be sustained by health and wellness apps.

Defeating doctor burnout

Studies show that every second healthcare provider is burned out at work. The issue got even worse during the coronavirus pandemic. Roughly 63% of physicians experienced at least one manifestation of burnout throughout 2021, compared to 38% in 2020.

That’s when apps for doctors’ well-being become handy for fighting burnout symptoms.

Growing revenue in leaps and bounds

In 2022, the annual revenue in the wellness app sector reached $2.7 billion. It is projected to hit $10 billion by 2030 with a CAGR of 17.7%.

You can now see why physicians buy online businesses like ready-made software for healthcare professionals or develop them from scratch.

Types and Examples of Physician well-being Apps

Explore examples of tools used to promote different types of wellness in healthcare professionals:

• Emotional/mental
• Physical
• Financial
• Occupational
• Intellectual

Emotional/mental wellness apps

First and foremost, physicians must care about their emotional well-being and overall life satisfaction.

They can do this with applications for meditation and sleep or apps for developing healthy habits and dealing with anxiety, stress, burnout, or low moods.

Examples: Calm, Headspace, MoodMission, Burnout Prevention Program

Physical wellness apps

You can invest in nutrition or fitness apps for healthcare professionals to promote physicians’ physical well-being.

Examples: MyNetDiary, MoovBuddy, WaterLogged

Financial wellness apps

Such apps help doctors become financially savvy and achieve financial security. It can be a tool for investment planning, budgeting, debt management, or everything in one place.

Examples: InvestHeath, Rocket Money, GoodBudget

Occupational wellness apps

Occupational wellness for physicians is a healthy balance in doctor workload and time management.

Solutions like a medical diagnosis app, doctor appointment scheduling app, or telemedicine management portal streamline workflows and remove the administrative burden.

Examples: DockHealth, Practo, DoctorOnDemand, HealthTap, Teladoc

Intellectual wellness apps

Physicians can grow intellectually with apps dedicated to medical education, training, and professional development.

Examples: MedLearn, Medscape, Epocrates App

An Ultimate Guide to Wellness App Development for Physicians

Here’s how to develop a wellness app for healthcare professionals. Follow the tips below.

1.  Set a budget and consider cost-minimization strategies

Here’s a harsh truth.

If you don’t apply this tactic, investing in healthcare app development can drain your pockets.

Let’s figure out how much it may cost you to build a wellness app for doctors.

According to Catherine Schwartz, Finance Editor at Crediful, “A price tag for developing wellness apps from scratch may range dramatically from $5,000 to $100,000. And this is not the limit. It depends on certain factors: the development team’s size and rates, time for app creation, number of features, design complexity, etc.”

However, you can create a physician wellness app even on a tight budget by implementing these price reduction techniques suggested by Catherine Schwartz:

• Make a list of all app requirements at the start to avoid costly changes later.
• Collaborate with freelance software developers (freelancers typically demand lower hourly rates).
• Pick a cross-platform app framework that works smoothly on iOS and Android platforms so developers don’t have to recode it once again for each platform individually.
• Visualize a prototype and an MVP (minimum viable product) to collect user feedback and make improvements.
• Launch regular automated testing to spot drawbacks and remove errors.

2.  Let your app name and design resonate with the audience

Naming and designing your wellness application for doctors are indispensable for successful healthcare branding.

“If your target audiences are physicians, naturally, you would want to appeal to them and make a compelling name and design of the doctor wellness app that caters to their needs,” notes Shawn Plummer, CEO at The Annuity Expert. “You can use the word health or abbreviations like Dr, MD, or Doc in the name.”

Track this naming pattern in the following physician wellness apps: SelfCare for HealthCare, ReferralMD, and Meaningful Doc.

As for design, Shawn Plummer recommends going with a less expressive, laconic UI/UX design. He says, “A combination of two or three colors in healthcare apps is more pleasant to the eyes than a gimmicky interface with an overabundance of colorful animations.”

For example:

Vitalize Care combined two complementary colors, light purple and orange, to create a balance and evoke a strong emotional response in the physician wellness app design.

3. Outline the key features

Some of the must-have features for physician wellness apps are:

• Login via email and social media
• Planning and goal-setting
• Activity tracker
• Daily check-in
• Notifications
• Third-party integrations

For example:

The functionality of the Healthy Physician Program by MSDC allows doctors to message other users, receive notifications and daily inspiration, watch wellness videos, make appointments with a wellness professional, and more.

You may also need such features as an appointment management system and video conferencing to make it possible to book appointments and video consultations online.

If it’s a financial well-being app for healthcare professionals, it would be wise to incorporate financial calculators.

4. Make your app inclusive

Let’s look at some facts.

In 2022, the largest distribution of US licensed physicians (32%) was 60+ years old. This number has grown by 54% between 2010 and 2022. As of 2023, the average age of a medical service provider worldwide is 53.9 years.

Relying on these factors, your wellness app for healthcare professionals should be age-inclusive in the first place.

“Inclusivity in physician wellness apps concerns not only the age factor,” remarks Robert Kaskel, Chief People Officer at Checkr. “It should be an all-encompassing approach to inclusive app development for healthcare industry workers. Age, gender, race, ethnicity, language, and disability are only a few factors to mention,” Kaskel says.

It’s not uncommon for healthcare apps to support localization and different languages.

For example:

UniConsulta is a bilingual health and wellness application for doctors and patients supporting the English and Spanish languages.

To make your wellness app more accessible for physicians, it’s also crucial to follow accessibility standards. For instance, one of the methods to stick to accessibility guidelines is to do app testing for ADA and WCAG compliance. Accessibility checkers like Accessibility Scanner, Axe Android, or Abra AI can help you identify mobile app accessibility issues and receive exact instructions on how to fix them.

5. Prioritize cybersecurity and data protection

Did you know?

Roughly 4,000 cyberattacks happen every day! And shockingly, 81% of apps have zero defense against those.

When developing a physician wellness app, the top cybersecurity threats to watch out for are malware attacks, data leakage, unreliable third-party APIs, weak encryption, etc. For instance, poor system design or insecure coding practices can lead to vulnerabilities in smart contracts or other elements vital for secure healthcare records management and related to consent, storage, and data processing.

You should also keep in mind different regulations for data protection by country:

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union
• The Digital Health Applications Ordinance (DiGAV) in Germany
• The Data Protection Act (DPA) in the United Kingdom
• The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada
• The Privacy Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US

Note: There are other state and local data protection laws worth checking. Some states in the USA have specific laws covering data privacy. For example, California has separate regulatory documents: the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

6. Start a pre-launch campaign

It’s never too early to spark interest in your wellness app for physicians and gather a community of potential users.

This is what the pre-launch phase is about.

“The first and foremost thing to do at the pre-launch stage is building app awareness to drive installs and signups,” says Puneet Gogia, Founder at Excel Champs “You can generate leads (potential users) with multiple methods. The best practices for app promotion and lead generation are buzzing about it on social channels and offering freebies for first signups,” he adds.

Why not announce the to-be-soon-released wellness app and build your brand’s authority on social media?

Here’s an announcement made by Eric Parker about the Giddy app on LinkedIn with rewards for early-bird registrations and app shares.

Or check how McKenna Ashcroft invites users to sign up for her fitness app pre-launch via YouTube.

Last Note on Developing Wellness Apps for Physicians

The rapid rise of wellness apps for healthcare providers is majorly prompted by the digital wave and the essential precondition of the modern medical profession when burnout is slapping in the face and knocking doctors off their feet.

At this rate, such tools can offer a comprehensive approach to physicians’ mental, physical, occupational, financial, and intellectual wellness.

By investing in them, you commit to the future of healthcare, become its navigator, and change the lives of healthcare professionals irrevocably for their benefit. And yours.

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