How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Telemedicine App: Price Breakdown

How much does it cost to develop a telemedicine app? The cost of creating a telemedicine application hides a lot of details that may significantly reflect on the final pricing: feature, tech stack, design, integrations, developers' hourly rates, and more. Without knowing these details it's impossible to define the exact price.

Still, it's possible to determine the average telemedicine software development cost to plan the budget. Let's find it out!

Telemedicine software for healthcare has great potential and is already making healthcare more accessible and stressless for patients and more cost-efficient for over 53% of healthcare organizations. However, the cost of telemedicine app requires attention to avoid budget constraints in the future. Let’s see 5 main-affecting factors below:

The functionality, it’s complexity and breadth can take the first place here. To start of, let’s divide it into two categories: Patient side functionality and Doctor side functionality.

Patient app functionality is all about making the patient experience convenient and intuitive. Patient features enable users to easily schedule appointments, access medical care remotely. This is especially important for patients with mobility issues, transportation challenges, or busy schedules. Let’s let’s take a closer look at each feature below:

Doctor app functionality simplifies your medical organization’s physicians' work, assisting them in patient records and appointment management. Doctors’ can efficiently allocate their time, review patient information, and communicate with patients, making them focus more on delivering quality care. Here is main physician-side functionality:

Besides overall functionality and convenience of usage, the cost of telemedicine app development strongly depends on its seamless interoperability among different platforms, including mobile (iOS, Android) and web platforms. Here, you can create a native app for each platform or leverage cross platform app development services. Note that going native means contributing more investments and will require $100,000-$250,000+ per platform. Cross-platform development cuts telemedicine app costs by reusing code, employing a unified development team, reducing maintenance, and tapping into a wider talent pool. This way, costs can be slashed by up to 50%.

The design of your telemedicine platform is the first thing the patient will see and decide if it is worth utilizing in the future. So, UI/UX design is definitely not worth cutting costs, as it has to be highly convenient, intuitive for an average user, and simple and eye-appealing. Considering creating a custom design highly tailored to your brand identity is definitely worth the effort, however, it’s more expensive, resulting in $20,000 to $50,000+. Anyway, you can still start simple, and the cost of a telemedicine app's basic UI/UX design may range from $10,000 to $20,000.

Healthcare is an industry where a high level of certification, regulatory compliance, and patient data security is required. Here is an exemplary list of regulations you may need to follow:

• HIPAA: sets standards for the protection of sensitive patient health information or PHI
• GDPR: Applies to telemedicine apps operating within the European Union and sets guidelines for personal data collection, storage, and processing
• FDA: This regulation is applied to telemedicine solutions that provide medical device support and diagnostics functionality
• PCI DSS: Saguards cardholder’s data during transactions
• Regional laws: Make sure to research country-specific licensure laws that state norms for physician licensing, patient-provider relationships, etc.

This list is not a final selection of regulations. It may differ depending on the region you plan to launch your telemedicine application.

You still have to thoroughly assess security features that will protect your patient data. Here is what you can take into consideration:

• End-to-end encryption
• Two-factor authentication
• Biometric authentication
• Role-based access
• Secure data transmission (protocols like TLS or SSL)
• Secure cloud storage

Alignment with regulation and implementation of security features will cost you $10,000 to $30,000+.

In current conditions, integration your telemedicine app with existing eHealth software solutions like lab systems, EHRs, or IoT devices, is essential. This will alow you to create an interconnected digital healthcare environment. However, enriching a your healthcare app with multiple integration may contribute to development complexity and overall telemedicine app development cost.

Approximately the cost to implement basic integrations will range from $10,000 to $30,000. Such integrations include:

• Appointment scheduling
• Payment gateways
• Email notifications, etc

In case you plan to implement more complex integrations additionally the price is going to range from $30,000 to $100,000. Such integrations may include:

• EHR/EMR
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Telehealth devices or wearables, etc.

As you’ve already learnt, telemedicine app development cost is not that easy to figure out initially. It strongly depends on the wide range of factors like features and their complexity, integrations, design considerations and more.

Anyway, one of the most popular ways to penetrate telemedicine niche is to create and MVP version or Minimal Viable Product. This is a basic telemedicine app with functionality that are enough to test the telemedicine app in real-world conditions. It takes less time and financial resources to develop and helps you to avoid particular risks using the trial and error method. If a fully completed telemedicine software requires 1200h-2400h+ at least, an MVP will take you approximately 800h-1200h.

MVP version of your telemedicine app will cost approximately $50,000 to $100,000.

We will try to answer the question of how much it costs to develop a telemedicine app based on the example of the MVP version.

Initially, telemedicine apps can be classified into three types: synchronous telemedicine apps, asynchronous apps, and remote monitoring apps.

Synchronous telemedicine apps facilitate real-time communication between patients and physicians through video consultations, phone calls, and secure messaging channels. The approximate synchronous telemedicine app development cost is $70,000-$150,000. .

Examples: Amwell, Doctor on Demand, Teladoc.

Asynchronous telemedicine solutions enable patients to communicate with healthcare providers at their convenience, with no need for simultaneous interaction. The cost of such app is ranging from $70,000 to $120,000.

Examples: 98point6, Maple, HeyDoctor.

Remote monitoring apps allow patients track and monitor their health parameters, like vital signs, chronic conditions, adherence to medication intake, and lifestyle habits, from their smartphones or other smart health devices. Remote patient monitoring software development services cost ranges from $90,000 to $200,000.

Examples: Livongo, Omada Health, MyChart.

The choice of cooperation model can also be a significant cost-affecting factor for telemedicine app development. Let’s take a look at the most commonly utilized ones:

• Freelance. Hiring autonomous freelancers for your telemedicine software development can be cost-efficient, but achieving desired quality outcomes may appear a lottery. Freelance developers hourly rates range from $25-$150/h depending on the region.
• In-house team. Setting up an in-house development team implies hiring full-time developers, designers, and other software professionals to design and build a telemedicine app. The usual salaries of in-house team members in the US can range from $60,000 to $150,000 per year, depending on qualification and skill set. Additionally, you’ll need to invest into office space, equipment, and overhead expenses.
• Outsourcing. Outsourcing healthcare software development is handling telemedicine app development to a third-party company, receiving cost-savings and well-tailored telehealth expertise. Hourly rates for outsourced specialists range from $50 to $200 per hour, based on the team location. So, in the US software developers rates are $60-$150+, in Estonia $40-$100+, and in the UK $50-$120+.

Choosing offshore mobile app development means encountering the diversity of developers' rates in different regions. To give you a slight hint, here are the telemedicine app development cost in each of the most popular outsourcing destinations:

Telemedicine development team size significantly affects the final telemedicine development cost due to higher labor costs, increased resource allocation, communicational overhead, and risks associated with more members present within your development team.

Here is the basic set of software experts you may need to make a telemedicine app:

• Project manager
• Business analyst
• Solution architect
• UI/UX designer
• Telemedicine app developers
• QA and DevOps engineers

However, sometimes you don’t need a full team, but particular healthcare software experts. In this case, you can leverage staff augmentation. It’s a cooperation model that lets you expand your external team expertise by hiring outsourced IT specialists.

Cleveroad can also help you extend your in-house development team with healthcare expertise, who can quickly onboard to your project, integrate into your internal workflows and get your business goals and brand image straightaway.

Besides the core factors, there are still some aspects the cost of a telemedicine app depends on. Here is what you should additionally consider:

Conducting healthcare data migration from your medical legacy systems can also seriously affect the final telemedicine app cost. If it’s not something you plan to dismiss, note that the complexity of data mapping, cleansing, and migration, and interoperability challenges, should be assessed in advance.

Generally, besides implementing telemedicine software into your medical practice workflow, it's vital to ensure it won't be underutilized due to lack of awareness or acceptance. Understanding how much does it cost to implement telehealth is just one piece of the puzzle. Investing in change management strategies, training programs, and user adoption initiatives is crucial to ensure successful integration and maximize the benefits of telehealth for both your practice and your patients.

This will help you to promote acceptance and adoption of the telemedicine platform among healthcare providers, staff, and patients as well.

To make your telemedicine app truly useful and highly functional, medical data analysis and reporting are required. Implementing robust data analytics algorithms, reporting dashboards, and medical insights generation capabilities within the telemedicine app is vital to providing all-encompassing quality care. Not tracking usage metrics, clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and operational performance require additional development efforts and data visualization expertise.

Telemedicine application is aimed to make healthcare easy and accessible. However, you'd probably agree it’s harder to receive medical help without knowledge of foreign language or culture.

To obtain patient loyalty, it’s better to include a diversification of cultural differences, considering cultural sensitivities and health practices, localizing user experience and app content.

Prior to diving straight into the telemedicine app development, don’t forget to allocate costs for software maintenance and support. This includes updates, bug fixes, and technical support services in the post-launch stage. This will enable you to ensure that the telemedicine app remains up-to-date, functional, secure, and compliant with evolving healthcare regulations and fresh technological solutions. Even though it increases the cost of telemedicine app development, supporting your app over time can significantly minimize performance and reliability concerns in the future perspective.

It's time to know the price to build a telemedicine software. Our estimate is based on the average hourly rate of $50/hour in Central Europe, Estonia.

Remember: this price is approximate. It varies according to your business needs and features.

First, take a look at the approximate telehealth app development cost for basic features.

Keep in mind: software developers aren't the only specialists you need on a team to build such a complex product.

Here's the full team composition you'll need:

• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• UI/UX designer
• Business Analyst
• Project Manager
• QA engineer
• DevOps engineer
• Team lead

Given that team composition and the amount of work, the cost of telemedicine app development will range from $100,000 to $250,000+. Feel free to contact our healthcare business engineering department to get a personalized estimation of your telehealth project.

Cleveroad is a healthcare software development company located in Estonia, Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2011, we have provided technical assistance to healthcare businesses of various scales in the creation of healthcare and telemedicine software solutions that improve patient care, optimize workflow in medical facilities, and Increase the performance of business by automating labor-intensive processes.

We help our clients develop a lot of eHealth solutions, including:

• EHR/EMR
• Telemedicine software
• E-prescribing software
• Medical billing software
• RPM with wearables devices
• Hospital Management Software (HMS)
• Health insurance software
• Healthcare CRMs
• Health tracking apps
• IoT, etc.

We thouruoghtly work on delivering healthcare solutions compliant with different regulations such as HIPAA, HITECH, HL7, CDA, TX-HB300, CCD, CCHIT, etc.

How do we estimate telemedicine app costs? We provide rough and detailed estimates.

The main purpose of the rough estimate is to orient a client on the approximate budget to count on and primarily outline the structure of the whole telemedicine app development process.

We create 2 rough estimates to get to the closest pricing accuracy tier by tier:

• The first one was created after the solution design workshop
• The second one after the product discovery phase

The Solution Design Workshop estimate is very raw and is made after the initial view of your telemedicine project. Based on previous experience with similar software delivery, the solution team defines your software project goals, complexity, work scope, and potential constraints.

We offer a client three estimate options: optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic. This enables us to figure out the strategy and the number of features to include in the estimate while staying within a budget and meeting the quality level of non-functional requirements (data privacy, risk-mitigation strategies, etc.).

The Discovery Phase rough estimate implies that we analyze business process specifications, create a more detailed feature list, and define non-functional requirements and architectural solutions.

Based on a more detailed software image, this estimate corrects the inaccuracies of the previous one and outlines the telemedicine software requirements in more detail. This estimate includes:

• The general section that describes the preparatory work
• Development that directly addresses the coding
• Integration of frameworks and libraries that enable us to speed up feature implementation
• Non-development aspects that mainly touch on the creation of well-structured technical documentation
• Suggestions section that contains improving proposals

Detailed estimate has nearly 100% of accuracy and is conducted along with developers that are directly involved into your telemedicine app creation. Prior gathering discovery phase requirements serve as a cortex that helps to define detailed requirements.

This is an iterative process divided by sprints. For each sprint or 2 sprints ahead, our business analyst prepares a list of detailed requirements or user stories. Depending on your unique project complexity and need, each user story is checked by the technical team lead, solution architect, and responsible developer. By evaluating each sprint step-by-step, it becomes possible to assemble a detailed estimate of the whole project

You can feel free to check out our portfolio and past clients reviews on Clutch to see the real feedback and work outcomes by your own eyes.