Developing Mobile Health Apps:
Best Practices And Considerations

Introduction

The mobile health apps market has increased dramatically in recent years. Smartphones and tablets, which people carry with them almost everywhere, are changing how healthcare is provided through mobile health apps, which offer greater convenience and access to everyone – for wellness tracking, telehealth appointments, chronic disease management, and more. Mobile health apps allow users to track or monitor health metrics, gather and access medical information, and contact or communicate with healthcare providers.
Mobile health apps are valuable and important for everyone in modern healthcare. In recent years, mobile health apps have become very important as they enable personalized health management, communication between patients and healthcare providers, remote monitoring, and more. They are the key to improving patient care, enhancing health outcomes, and optimizing healthcare delivery. The future of healthcare looks bright with the continuous incubation and development of new and effective mobile health apps. However, developing such an app requires careful balancing of several elements, such as user experience, compliance with regulations and standards, data security, and functionalities.
In this article, we summarize best-practice instructions and essential considerations in mobile health app development for those interested in designing and building successful apps: whether you consider yourself an app developer, healthcare professional, or entrepreneur, your understanding of these principles will guarantee the development of mobile health applications that are innovative, user-friendly, secure and compliant with regulatory requirements. We will outline some essential recommendations and insights into the design and build of mobile health apps to address some common pitfalls, and we will attempt to peer into the future of health tech.

Best practices for developing mobile health apps

User-centered design

• Importance of understanding user needs and behaviors - Staying focused and on budget when developing mobile health apps is critical. Keeping these strategies in mind will help you and your team get your mobile health app off the ground and into the hands of your initial group of users. The first two strategies – stakeholder buy-in and user needs and behaviors – are key to developing a mobile health app that is both useful and engaging. User needs and behaviors dictate the success or failure of a mobile health intervention.
• Conducting user research and creating personas - The first step towards building a successful app is researching your users. You can learn more about them through surveys, interviews, and usability testing so you can discern their expectations and pain points. The next step is creating user personas by distilling this information to a fine grain so you can craft an app that speaks to a diverse set of user needs and acts as a companion to your users.
• Designing intuitive and accessible user interfaces - The interface that users interact with needs to be intuitive and accessible, thus making the user identify the location of objects, provide feedback on the user’s input, and integrate necessary tools and resources. Also, the interface needs to be responsive in terms that screen orientations should scale based on different devices’ width and height; fonts need to be readable no matter how zoomed in the text view is, buttons should focus on tap areas, and link areas need to be tappable. The interface that we are attempting to design here should be accessible and should adhere to current best practices for users with disabilities. The interface should handle screen readers or zoomers that could be used to increase the viewing area.

Regulatory compliance

• Overview of relevant regulations - Do you understand the laws and regulations applicable to mobile health app development? In the United States, privacy and securing electronic health information are regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), while in Europe, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of regulations establishing EU data protection rules and user consent guidelines. Certain types of health apps fall under the jurisdiction of HIPAA laws. Knowing what regulations and laws govern your app will ensure that you do not violate privacy rights or fail to take the proper safeguards for user security.
• Ensuring data privacy and security - Strong data privacy and security standards are essential to the usability of health data and will likely be required to ensure the confidentiality of highly sensitive health information. Examples include the encryption of static data at rest and in transition, secure access controls, and the ability of end-users and data custodians to update security protocols regularly to address emerging vulnerabilities. Structuring data collection and storage practices to conform to the higher regulatory requirements of the data-rich health industry will also be necessary.
• Steps to achieve compliance during development - To ensure compliance, integrate compliance requirements into development from the beginning. This step includes a comprehensive threat model (aka risk assessment) to identify security and privacy risks, the implementation of consent forms and audit trails and de-identification or anonymization, and legal and compliance gates involving review and validation of your app with respect to relevant regulations.

Functionality

Identifying core functionalities based on target user needs - If you were planning to build an app to help users manage their chronic conditions, then at a minimum it should have features that allow them to track their specific symptoms, have reminders for their medications (time-and-drug-specific), and educate them on the particular condition they are managing. It is difficult to see how a chronic conditions app could be of meaningful value without first getting these core functionalities right.

Balancing Functionality with Usability - The app should do a lot, but it must be used for. Feature bloat is the bane of technology; features should provide functionality and be easy to use. You should find and fix design issues through usability tests that help you spot blockers to use before they become frustrating to real users.

Interoperability

• Importance of integration with existing healthcare systems - The app must be connected to existing healthcare systems, so it can relay and retrieve information seamlessly. For example, integration with an electronic health record (EHR) or patient portal would allow the app users to store their health information within the patient database and give care co-ordinators access to the information the patient shares. These examples highlight the importance of designing mobile health apps within existing infrastructures.
• Using standard protocols for data exchange - Existing protocols such as HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) allow data exchange between systems by providing a standard for the resulting data and transactions. HL7 FHIR, for instance, ensures all results are formatted and readable across different healthcare platforms.
• Ensuring seamless data flow and communication between systems - Your app should provide a seamless information exchange with systems. i.e., it should use adapters, apps, and data integration to communicate with your patient’s care systems—health records, labs, hospital information systems, etc. You then need to test and retest the adapters, apps, and data integration to ensure accuracy in data exchange.

Data security and privacy

• Implementing robust encryption and security measures - Strong encryption helps protect consumer data from unauthorized access. Create a robust, multi‑layered encryption policy for data at rest and in transit. Secure the consumer account using user-friendly, strong encryption authentication such as multi-factor authentication.
• Ensuring secure data storage and transmission - Data storage and transmission need to be secure. Make sure your app doesn’t suffer from a leaked data breach by keeping it on a secure server or cloud service that offers vast and superior security products. Constantly ensure your data is encrypted while in use and even when it is logged.
• Managing user consent and data access controls - Users should understand the uses of their data and consent not to their being collected or processed. They should be able to revoke consent at any time and only receive information for which they’ve given consent. Some data should only be accessible by certain employee roles.

Performance and reliability

• Ensuring app performance under various conditions - The app must work well for many different types of devices in many types of network conditions. Test the app on different devices and network conditions to identify and correct for edge cases that slow it down, make it unresponsive, or cause crashes.
• Regular testing and debugging - Regular testing and debugging are essential for maintaining an app's quality. Make sure you have a thorough testing strategy that covers all aspects of unit, integration, and user acceptance testing. Catch any bugs or performance issues and fix them immediately so that your users will have a great experience with your app.
• Importance of maintaining high reliability and uptime - A mobile or app needs to work properly to ensure high reliability and uptime. This is necessary to build up user trust and satisfaction. Monitoring needs to be installed to track the performance and availability of the app, and contingency plans should be prepared for downtime or other technical issues. The app needs to be reviewed and updated regularly to maintain reliability and to tackle any new issues that might come up.

Considerations for developing mobile health apps

Market research and strategy

• Conducting market analysis to identify target audience and competitors - Before you develop a mobile health app, perform detailed market research. Analyze your target audience to understand their needs, preferences, and usage behaviors. Find out the key demographics, common health issues, and user patterns among the target users. Likewise, examine your competitors to learn about their positioning, strengths, and gaps in the market. This analysis will help you align your app in the right direction and fill the void in the market.
• Developing a clear value proposition and marketing strategy - Create a differentiated value proposition and marketing strategy. How does your app provide users with unique value, and why is it more attractive than your competitors? How will you market your app? What is your messaging—your hook for users? What is your plan for marketing distribution (e.g., social media channels, affiliate partners, influencer marketing, etc.)? Define your system around user acquisition and retention.
• Planning for app monetization and revenue models - Choose the type and methods of monetizing an app: in-app purchasing, subscription model, freemium model, or agreements with healthcare providers to act as conduits for information transfer. Choose a revenue model that is in line with your app’s purpose, intended population, and market position. Make sure that the monetization process does not detract from the usability of the app or the user experience.

Cross-platform development

• Benefits and challenges of developing for multiple platforms - The benefits include expanding an app to reach a wider audience, while drawbacks include managing consistency between platforms and maintaining differing development requirements. Weigh the benefits of expanding your user base against the additional complexity and cost of cross-platform development.
• Choosing the right development approach - Decide on the development approach that best suits your app based on its needs and your target audience. In native development, you create separate codebases for iOS and Android. This is often the best way to achieve performance and take advantage of platform-specific features and design. On the other hand, with hybrid or cross-platform frameworks, you can create a single codebase for all platforms, and that can help greatly with development times and costs. It can also sometimes mean lower performance and some loss of access to native features. Decide based on your own requirements and resources.
• Ensuring consistent user experience across platforms - No matter how the application is developed, the user’s experience of the same app should be consistent. The visual design should use standard elements, the functionality should be as similar as possible (easiest with a common set of functionality), and the user experience should be tested extensively on different devices and operating systems.

User engagement and retention

• Strategies to increase user engagement - Encourage users to keep coming back to the app by offering them rewards, challenges, or leaderboard points on a regular basis, elements known as ‘gamification’. Targeted content delivered to the user (e.g., the weather in that location or notifications when it’s time to get up) based on where they are and what they already do performs better than untargeted content.
• Importance of regular updates and feature enhancements - Regular updates and feature enhancements are important to keep the app relevant and address user feedback. Adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the speed and usability of the app with updates helps keep users interested and satisfied. Make sure to publicize new features and improvements to users.
• Collecting and analyzing user feedback for continuous improvement - Survey, review, and in-app feedback such as: ‘Something’s not working – and here’s why’ analyze and act on feedback to improve app functionality and user experience. Make changes as recommended by user insights frequently.

Collaboration with healthcare professionals

• Involving healthcare professionals in the development process - Ensure healthcare professionals have a stake in development from early on; not only can they check that the app meets clinical standards and meets a real-world need (and perhaps guide decisions on features), but they can also help bring an evidence base to the project.
• Ensuring clinical accuracy and relevance of app features - Check whether the app has clinically accurate and relevant features by reviewing and validating content, algorithms, and functionalities with healthcare experts and making sure they adhere to the latest medical guidelines and practices.
• Building trust and credibility with users through professional endorsements - Work with users by obtaining professional endorsements of your app Get endorsements from well-known physician or healthcare institutions Attach endorsements to your marketing messages such as websites, banners and posters.

Conclusion

Balancing innovation with user-centered design and regulatory requirements to create apps that meet user expectations and add value to healthcare outcomes can be a challenge. This is achievable with care and attention to discovering user needs and preferences, achieving regulatory compliance, providing essential features, and maintaining data security. Market needs, platform support, ongoing user engagement, and partnerships with healthcare providers all factor into success. The rapidly changing nature of mobile health holds both challenges and opportunities. To be innovative and to take advantage of these opportunities, balancing innovation with user-centered design and regulatory requirements is essential.