Healthcare App Development: A Startup’s Guide

In healthcare app development, any healthcare startup goes through the MVP stage, then growth, and finally, scaling, despite varying regulatory pathways, number of stakeholders, and funding needs. 

For instance, Headspace is a well-known meditation app. Its MVP was an extremely stripped-down meditation guide and a 10-session free pack.  Then, for its growth stage, Headspace introduced habit loop mechanics, flexible durations for sessions, thematic packs, instant SOS sessions, and specialized content for sleep and physical health. Finally, for the scaling stage, like for any other wellness app, corporate wellness contracts are quite a desirable development. More specifically, Headspace Enterprise features:

• HIPAA compliance, 
• BAAs (legal obligation to secure users’ Protected Health Information), 
• SOC 2 Type II certificate to guarantee data encryption at rest and in transit, a firewall, and access controls;
• HITRUST CSF Certification, which is a massive unifying audit system that corporate buyers trust.  

While HITRUST CSF is an overkill for an MVP, a healthcare MVP development services should architecturally prepare for stringent security requirements, especially in terms of data management: 

• data isolation (e.g., isolated S3 buckets), 
• TLS 1.2+ for encryption of data in transit, AES-256 for encrypting data at rest, and a dedicated Key Management Service
• Audit login for SOC 2 audit in the future.

In this blog post, we’ll outline development pathways for major healthcare app categories: consumer health, enterprise healthcare, and clinical apps. The guides will account for regulatory demands and MVP, growth, and scaling stages. Finally, the guides will compare major development partners for healthcare app development, such as You are launched, Dogtown Media, Sidebench, and Netguru.

Startup’s Guide for Consumer Health Apps: Digital Health App Development

This category in healthcare app development has two very specific challenges. Since it generally requires low regulatory compliance, the barrier to entry is low. Thus, strong competition. For instance, there are thousands of just sleep apps on the market, with 700 of them being highly rated. Secondly, wellness apps help users to live better lives, and it often requires motivating them to bridge the gap between their hectic real self and their aspirational self. Sort of, to help them become a person they want to be in the circumstances that push them towards less healthy habits and choices. This requires strong UX/UI work and mechanics. For instance, Headspace’s MVP featured minimalist & warm animations, increasingly accessible UI, and a zero-clutter interface.

MVP

A wellness or lifestyle MVP cannot be just a basic tool – there are already hundreds, if not more, solutions. Yet, MVP should be narrow and test very specific hypotheses and mechanics. This makes event-based analytics tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel a must-have from DAY 1. This is exactly what You are launched does for lean startups. MVP should expose real-life friction points through tracking micro-events:

• time-to-first-action after a notification, 
• completion rate of a 2-minute habit,
• scheduling a session (fitness, mindfulness, meditation, etc.)
• sign up for a daily motivation reminder, etc. 

Then, a startup should gather qualitative data – user interviews. This is about understanding the ‘WHY’ of drop-off, their emotional and circumstantial triggers or obstacles.

Finally, the app should have a setup for measuring real-life outcomes. This can be weekly micro-surveys (like check-ins) or functionality around the primary indicator. For instance, improvements in sleep quality or stress levels over time that the user can see.  For such apps, screen time or the fact of opening rarely matters. 

Growth

To grow a successful validated mechanic, such apps often dive into personalization. These are smart behavioral notifications, adding community & gamification functionality, integrating apps into ecosystems with hardware such as Apple HealthKit, Health Connect, or wearables like Oura, Apple Watch, etc. From a development partner, it requires an already proven track record of:

• Architectural solutions that support feature flags, A/B testing, remote configuration, and modular recommendation engines. It will help the velocity of releasing behavioral interventions without a new app release. 
• Unified data model for engagement signals, wearable data, user-reported outcomes, and event analytics. This ensures the startup can conduct longitudinal studies, cohort comparison, and have enough data for ML algorithmization.
• Privacy policy, granular consent management, audit logs, and clear data retention should be strengthened, while present all along from the MVP stage.

Scaling

The mature phase is where a B2C model moves into corporate wellness. For this, the startup will need a partnership with research institutions, clinical backing, and reliable outcomes delivery. For instance, Headspace Enterprise provides performance outcomes guarantees by “… offering fees at risk for key outcomes and access metrics.” 

Startup’s Guide: How to Develop A Healthcare App in Enterprise Healthcare

Enterprise healthcare app development is about increasing the efficiency of workflows at hospitals and private practices, helping manage doctor-patient relationships, and so on. While the end user can be a medical staff member, an admin personnel, or a patient, the buyer for such apps is hospitals, clinical networks, or insurance providers. Overall, the two very specific challenges of healthcare app development in this category are: multiple stakeholders and strict regulatory and integration requirements. 

In many cases, the challenge here is not only about building an app for efficiency or cost-cutting measures. Hospital apps help keep local emergency rooms open, democratize care, improve accessibility to healthcare services, protect medical staff from burnout, and enhance the quality of doctor-patient interactions.

The route here is to develop a healthcare app for a particular hospital and its EHR system, then grow within hospitals with the same EHR system, and, finally, scale into a variety of EHR systems. Here is an overview:

• For instance, EPIC covers 42.3% of the US EHR market, which includes large hospitals across many states, community hospitals, independent practices, retail clinicals, and nursing facilities. 
• The other major player is Oracle Health with 22.9% of the market. The company acquired the legacy Cerner EHR system and was rebuilt as cloud-native solution on Oracle infrastructure that includes built-in AI. Oracle Health, by acquiring Cerner, inherited its federal contracts from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Military Health System (MHS). 
• The third largest EHR system is MEDITECH with 12% of the US market. It serves small-to-midsize community hospitals and rural facilities. 

The choice of the EHR platform is basically the cornerstone of go-to-market strategy. Once the app proves itself in a single hospital, its blueprint is valid for other hospitals using this same system.

You are launched: MamaTalk as a bridge between Enterprise Healthcare and Consumer Health App

MamaTalk represents a utility app that provides multilingual, culturally adapted pregnancy support. It solves a healthcare operational failure. Hospital translation services can be expensive & rarely available, which creates liability and obstetric risks. For patients, this app reduces anxiety, prevents miscommunication with health providers and in the delivery room, as well as improves clinical compliance. Its go-to-market strategy relies on grants, health departments, and hospital maternity wards. Yet, it does not require approvals from regulatory bodies as it is not a diagnostic device and there are no EHR integrations; it ultimately falls within consumer digital health app development.

Sidebench: Baby Steps LA for NICU Discharge

This is one more enterprise health tool that essentially is a patient communication/education tool. However, this one already requires strict HIPAA and PHI protection. The end users are medical personnel and parents. NICU personnel ‘favorite’ educational content for stressed parents: instructions, input symptoms, diagnosis, drug schedules, and checklists.  In 2019, the developer, Sidebench, alongside other awards, took 3rd place in the American Hospital Association Innovation Challenge for this app. The app is functioning and maintains a 4.7 rating. 

MVP

MVP focuses strictly on single-point validation. It should solve one operational problem for one department in one pilot hospital. The deliverables of this kind of MVP should also be straightforward:

• Can it save clinical time / reduce discharge bottlenecks / prevent nurse overtime / capture lost revenue?

The tech stack should incorporate SMART-on-FHIR standards as it often should integrate with an existing EHR workspace.

Growth

The results of the pilot stage, gathered into the case study, serve as a validation signal to similar hospitals. The growth stage is basically about formalizing the solution for the enterprise procurement pipeline. You list the solution in the vendor ecosystem, such as EPIC Showroom, Oracle Health Developer Program, or MEDITECH Alliance. Finally, you undergo compliance steps such as SOC 2 Type II Certification, BAA (Business Associate Agreement), and HITRUST CSFs. 

Scaling

Scaling can be into other EHR ecosystems, within other hospital departments, or through hospitals of different sizes and private practices.

Startup’s Healthcare App Development Guide for Clinical Apps

The apps in this category help diagnose, treat, and monitor patients. Due to this, most solutions will require FDA clearance starting from the growth stage, such as Class II Software as a Medical Device / SaMD pathways or international CE mark certification. 

However, in the MVP stage, the regulatory requirements are lower as the solution does not alter clinical flow. For instance, an AI/ML imaging diagnostic algorithm for early cancer diagnosis undergoes two distinct phases that do not alter clinical diagnosis.

• First, a healthcare startup needs to validate the algorithm, such as whether it can spot anomalies early enough, based on a training medical set of images.
• Once the algorithm has proven itself, there is a workflow validation. It should prove that it does not disrupt the hospital’s local server, processes the image quickly, and that the accuracy of the results goes to the locked research dashboard. The latter should see if the AI caught any cases that a radiologist missed, and its overall accuracy.

Thus, in the MVP stage, the solutions require startups to follow strict quality (like ISO 13485 standards for medical software), security, and audit protocols for the clinical trials and “shadow” modes. Only after these two distinct MVP phases does the product need FDA clearance.

You are launched with Careviz and  Netguru with Tech To The Rescue

There is a host of apps that revolve around diagnosis & symptoms but do not require FDA approval. These are apps that help track symptoms for chronic conditions or create a community for people living with certain diseases. For instance, Careviz is such an app for people undergoing cancer treatment and after it. It connects people, helps them share stories, and also helps them purchase wellness products that helped other people to go through this.

In 2020, Netguru, alongside Divante, launched an initiative ‘Tech To The Rescue’, initially as a COVID-19 initiative, to match medical NGOs with tech volunteers. Today, it has grown into a global AI-enabled ecosystem to help NGOs use AI for social impact.

MVP

For regulated healthcare app development, an MVP consists of an isolated environment that receives images or biometric data and a research dashboard to review results. The non-regulated track, like Careviz, should include a community feed, symptom tracking, and usually an AI feature such as a chatbot to provide personalized reminders of activities and tasks.

Another example of an MVP comes from Dogtown Media. In 2018, the company was one of the winners of the Third Annual Defence Innovation Challenge with its Battlefield One – a medical proof-of-concept product. While there is no data on the device and app ever entering the production phase, it was a great display of internal R&D efforts.

Growth

Here, the regulated healthcare app should include full-blown UX/UI work, real-time RPM or dashboard with automated alerts, live biometric telemetry, and, most importantly, clinician decision-making support functionality.

For non-regulated apps, growth usually means cross-platform expansion, integration with Apple HealthKit or Google Fit, and more personalization.

Scaling

For a regulated app, this stage includes full-scale enterprise-wide clinical deployment via native EHR workflows. For a non-regulated one, this often includes qualifying the solution for HSA/FSA spending accounts.

Choosing Your Partner for Healthcare App Development: You are launched vs Dogtown Media vs Sidebench vs Netguru

	You are launched	Dogtown Media	Sidebench	Netguru
Rates for digital health app development	$25 – $49 / hr	$100 – $149 / hr	$50 – $99 / hr	$50 – $99 / hr
Primary services	Web & mobile app development	Mobile app development across many industries, including healthcare	Enterprise-grade solutions & complex systems integrations primarily in healthcare & medical tech in the US	Omnichannel AI-native commercial solutions, and AI for streamlining healthcare workflows
Strengths	Expert at MVP custom healthcare product development & lean startup methodology, speed and cost-efficient development, internal R&D to ensure quality and scalability of digital health app development	Epic verified partner (Epic controls 42% of the US EHR market)	Focus on broader interoperability for EHR systems (Epic, Cerner, & legacy infrastructures), strong data mapping capabilities, as well as integrations with CRMs like Salesforce Health Cloud	Focuses on healthcare AI chatbots and how AI redefines existing solutions

Final Recommendations: Choosing a Partner to Develop a Healthcare App

Based on each company’s expertise & rates, here is the suggested choice of a partner to develop a healthcare app. 

• For most MVP healthcare startups, the priority will be cost-efficiency & speed. You are launched offers the most affordable rates, consistently respecting the budget and delivering according to the deadline. With enterprise and clinical apps, if your solution requires substantial funding, Sidebench & Netguru feature more industry expertise that can help convince VCs to invest. 
• You are launched follows best practices in modular development, security & encryption, and its internal R&D activities ensure app preparedness for growth & scale. Therefore, it can be a reliable, secure, and affordable partner for most growth-stage startups. In other cases, with a variety of stakeholders to manage, some partners might be better convinced by onboarding a US-native development partner such as Sidebench or Dogtown Media. 
• Netguru’s success with its Tech to the Rescue initiative makes it perfect for global scale in the consumer apps category. Additionally, its experience in collaborating with NGOs, hospitals, and research centers can be a great asset to those who scale in clinical app categories. Moreover, Sidebench has strong capabilities in integrations across numerous EHR systems. This makes them also a good choice for growth and scale in the US market across enterprise healthcare & clinical app categories. Other worthy development partners include Dogtown Media, especially for military healthcare and IoMT, and Sidebench for US-wide clinical solutions.

	Consumer Health Apps	Enterprise Healthcare	Clinical Apps
MVP	You are launched	You are launched / Sidebench	You are launched / Netguru
Growth	You are launched / Netguru	You are launched / Sidebench	You are launched / Sidebench / Dogtown Media
Scaling	You are launched / Netguru / Sidebench	Dogtown Media / Sidebench	Dogtown Media / Sidebench / Netguru