Medical app design guide for beginners

An interesting statistics from Statista showcases that, the market volume of the digital health market is going to cross over $223.7 billion by 2020. It doesn't only involves numeric boom in terms of digital healthcare service providers, but also includes opportunities in medical app design and development.?

That brings us right into our topic of the day- how to pursue better medical app design as a designer. Well, there is no particular rule book that you have to go through. It's all about improvisation and innovation.?

Let's put an end to the intro and jump right into the guide-?

Features of A Medical App

In every kind of business app, there is a particular list of features that they come up with. And a medical app is no different.?

Usually, there are these general features provided in a medical app-

The Dashboard?

The dashboard is the parent panel of all the other features that your medical app would come up with. The dashboard is used by solo practitioners to ensure a top notch performance and to handle the healthcare metrics as well. The core benefit lies into aggregate and benchmark medial data of the performance.?

Based on what sort of business model the application lies within, there can be a number of dashboard variation-?

1. Patient dashboard.?
2. Hospital dashboard.?
3. Performance dashboard.?
4. And many more.?

Patient Portal

Whatever facility the people are supposed to receive fro the patient end, are enlisted and organized in the patient portal. They can interact with functions like scheduling, downloading, uploading(reports), healthcare information accessing, billing, electronic prescription, etc.?

The benefits of this scheme are beyond description. It can foster better patient-physician interaction while improving the clinical outcomes well.?

Analytics, Reporting, and Charting

A number of important databases are supposed to be under the radar of this feature. This is used more in advanced medical apps like EMRs, EHRs, Hospital Dashboard, etc. The sole purpose of this segment is to provide a pictorial presentation of data in forms of graphs or pie charts.?

Eventually, this form of presentation helps the authority to understand the tone of patient related data, prepare advanced reporting, induce better diagnosis and treatment accuracy and so on.?

Real time Communication

Telemedicine and telehealthcare are the new cool. And this is the feature of a medical app that is going to host such sort of features in the medical app.?

In here, real time communication is the key. As an example of real time communication, there comes telemedicine, video consultancy, patient monitoring, etc. Such sort of communication also reduces the wait time of the patients.?

Wearable Integration

This feature is generally supported in mobile applications that are able to connect to fitness tracker devices, pacemakers, etc. From these tracker devices, health information like calorie burn, blood pressure, heartbeat rate, etc are transferred into displayable data onto your medical app. These data are later used in storing and reporting purposes.?

Why Choosing The Right App Business Model?

So, you have established the essence of a medical app for your business. Now, before you design it yourself or hand it over to the designer, decide the intent that your app will serve you with.?

Healthcare and medical apps have a wide diversity. A few of the most conventional ones look like these-?

Telehealth Service App

Telehealth service apps, as they sound, are based on remote communication for monitoring, communicating, etc. According to the Center for Connected Health Policy, they are supposed to serve for major purposes- Vidoe Conferencing, Store and Forward, Remote Patient Monitoring and Mobile Healthcare.?

Clinical Diagnosis App

This is the remote transformation of what we call physical diagnosis. Through these kinds of apps, physicians get to analyze the symptoms, signs and lab test reports to medicate the patient.?

Scheduling Service App

To book physical appointments of the physicians, it takes a lot of effort for the expected patients. To come out with a solution to this problem, Medical Scheduling Apps are there.?

Medical Resource Provider App

This sort of app is for rather medical students(would be physicians) instead of for patients. In this kind of apps, you get to learn medical resources along with references, ICD guides, and other essential information.?

So, our advice would be, before writing a single code, decide which of these medial app business model you are going to adopt.?

A Quick Guide on Designing Medical App

The days are gone when just a basic design with all the information placed in a proper manner would be just fine. In 2019, you've to keep your keep eyes on a number of aspects while designing a medical app.?

Just like any other business app, a medical app requires an intuitive user interface where a seamless flow is essential. But as there are a handful of data that it has to deal with, a researched and planned effort is required.?

Here are a few quick tips for designing a medical app that stands out-?

1. Focus on consistency and make it completely end user(customer)-centric.?
2. Make sure usability simple and induce proper safety specifications.?
3. Deliver information based on health priority. Customize this manner if required.?
4. Simply the workflow process by ideating and iterating.?
5. Research on the pain points of the users ends and ensure a seamless experience.?

The Colour Scheme

The color scheme plays a great role when it comes to the user's satisfaction with a medical app. Because to ensure the user's comfort and calmness in using the app, the atmosphere is widely set by the color scheme.?

Broadly, there are two sets of color schemes for a medical app- The Cold Colour Tone, and the Warm Tones.?

The Cold Color Tone

Cold colors are used to be used in the background of a medical app. These tones can establish a sense of tranquility, and that lets the user to concentrate on more important features of the app.?

The colors that induce a cold tone in a medical app are-?

1. White: Used generally as a background color. Example- Quip.
2. Blue: Represents peace, calm and honesty. Example- NovaVita.?
3. Green: A widely popular color that represents vigor, generosity, good luck, etc. Example: LooseYoga Studios.?

The Warm Color Tone

When it comes to medical app design, warm color tones also have their places. But mostly, these colors are used as highlighters. In case you want to use warm colors as the foundations, we highly recommend to stick to softer and more neutral shades of them.?

Here are a few glimpses about warm colors and their uses-?

1. Pink: Used to express tenderness, sensitivity, childhood and romantic aspects. Example: Jackson Women's Health Organization.?
2. Yellow: Quite a gentle color, often used to express happiness, sunshine, joy, and hope. Example: Grown.

Bottom Line

So, this was our guide on how to implement medical app design guide and how you can find new to newer dimensions in your design. All that being said, there are tons of other aspects in technical terms which we wish to cover in our next part. Till then, happy designing!