How To Build An MVP For A Healthcare Product

The healthcare IT market is growing by leaps and bounds and is expected to reach USD 294,973 million by 2030, fueled by an increased interest of patients to telehealth, medical wearables, as well as pandemic-driven desire to improve overall well-being. Many healthtech startups and large healthcare companies are looking to get into the game and take the market by storm with their own healthcare products.

However, did you know that up to 45% of new products fail and almost 90% of startups don’t make it? From a poor market fit to fierce competition to insufficient funding, there are different reasons for that. To reduce the risk of failure, forward-thinking businesses often start with MVP development.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is not a new concept. It has been around for many years as part of the agile and lean development methodologies. Eric Ries popularized the idea of MVP in his book “The Lean Startup” published in 2011. And although it is not a mandatory step in the development process, it is definitely a smart one as it allows companies to:

• Validate key assumptions about the product. Testing the product idea early on and with minimum resources allows to determine if there is a market need for it or if it can be developed within a viable business model;
• Reduce risks associated with launching a new product. By testing the product with real users and collecting feedback, startups can refine the product and address any issues early on without investing in a product that will fail;
• Attract investors by demonstrating a viable product that has already been tested in the market by real users.

Indeed, with an MVP you can safely test the waters and navigate to success by building a healthcare product that meets users’ needs. So, let’s see what healthcare MVP development looks like.

Turning the MVP wheel: Five stages of healthcare MVP development

1.??? Start with research

First things first, and before deciding on functionality or design, it’s important to conduct a thorough market research, identify your target audience and understand what problems you want to solve with your product. Are you looking to help providers improve access to medical care and better manage population care? Or do you want to make it easier for patients to track their vitals and handle their chronic conditions? Surveys, focus groups, and interviews are a great way to gather information and validate your assumptions. Competition analysis can also provide valuable insights into your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and find your own niche to fill.

2.??? Prioritize core MVP features

Once you have identified your target audience and their pain points, you can start defining the set of features that your healthcare solution would need to successfully address users’ needs. And the list can be quite extensive if you want your product to stand out from the crowd. That said, not every feature needs to go into MVP. In fact, MVP’s main goal is to clearly demonstrate unique value and reasons to use the product in the first place. That’s why feature prioritization is key.

There are different techniques that help product teams separate core MVP features from those that can go into future iterations. Most popular include:

• MoSCoW matrix that divides features into logical subcategories: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t have this time.

Source: TechTarget

• Feature buckets that categorize features into metric movers, customer requests, and customer delights.

Source: DZone

• Kano model that puts customers at the heart of service development and prioritizes features based on customer satisfaction

Source: buildd

3.??? Design the UI

The actual design of your MVP is just as important as its functionality. For a medical solution to be successfully adopted by users, it needs to be highly intuitive, pleasant to use and easy to navigate. While all your design decisions must be rooted in real users’ needs, it’s important to remember that those needs might be different for different people — a healthcare app for kids will definitely differ from a solution for adults. In addition, healthcare UX design must be centered on inclusivity and accessibility.

Source: Elinext

4.??? Build and test your MVP

MVP is one of the basic concepts of agile methodology that allows teams to move in short iterations or sprints in order to quickly adapt to evolving product requirements and changing market conditions.

Work closely with the development team to prepare user stories and acceptance criteria, create and refine product and sprint backlogs. When choosing an ideal tech stack for your healthcare MVP, think long-term as it needs to meet all future product requirements, so look for a healthy combination of flawless performance and easy scalability. And even though your healthcare MVP is not your final product, do not skimp on quality assurance or in the end you might face technical issues and ultimately a loss of users’ motivation to use your product in the first place.

5.??? Iterate and improve

Once you have a functional healthcare MVP, it is time to launch it to your target audience and gather feedback. Users’ comments and observations are a source of valuable insights on how you can further improve and refine your solution.

Now that we have discussed the main steps of building an MVP, let’s talk more about the roadblocks that may come along the way. After all, creating a solution for an industry as heavily regulated as healthcare comes with its own set of challenges.

Challenges to keep in mind when building a healthcare MVP

Challenge 1. Regulatory compliance issues

Depending on the country, healthcare products must comply with a number of regulations — HIPAA and HITECH (USA), PIPEDA (Canada), GDPR (EU), and more. And building a solution with regulatory compliance adds to the overall complexity and time of the development process.

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Challenge 2. Cyber threats

Given that the healthcare industry is awash with personal data that is both extremely sensitive and valuable, it comes as no surprise that it has become a prime target for cybercriminals. Any solution that handles personal health data must be equipped with robust security features like multi-factor authorization, role-based access control, end-to-end data encryption, and more to avoid data breaches or other security issues.

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Challenge 3. Increased risk for some groups of patients

Healthcare is about people’s lives, so launching a new healthcare product, even in its minimum form, requires thorough research, extensive domain expertise and professional validation. Developing a healthcare solution targeted at certain groups of people that are more at risk like the elderly, pregnant women, or people with chronic diseases or complex conditions is different than rolling out a meditation app.

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Challenge 4. Integration with existing systems

Last but not least, you also need to think about how your healthcare solution will play with other systems. It’s one thing if you are building a mobile fitness and wellbeing app to help users support a healthy lifestyle. But it’s completely different if you are developing an MVP of a complex healthcare solution like EHR/EMR systems that needs to be easily integrated with the existing ecosystem that a healthcare provider may already have in place.

Are you looking to develop a healthcare MVP?

Wrapping up, it is clear that a lot goes into building a minimum viable product for the healthcare industry — from thorough market research and competitors analysis to UX/UI design and wireframing to launching and collecting feedback. In addition, developing a healthcare MVP requires careful consideration of regulatory compliance, data privacy and security, user experience, and integration with existing systems. That said, building an MVP is an important step that can help you validate your idea, get feedback from real users, and save time and money.

Elinext has been helping healthtech startups and healthcare providers build highly secure and interoperable solutions and mHealth apps that automate medical workflows, improve car delivery and boost patient engagement. Whether you need to build an MVP or turn your prototype into a full-blown solution, we have the domain knowledge and technical expertise to do that.