4 Important Tips for Building a Healthcare App

Demand for healthcare apps has grown sharply and stayed high: patients now expect to manage appointments, treatment, and consultations from their phones.

Besides the traditional video consultations with doctors, there has been an increasing demand for healthcare apps. They are just a tap away from you, on your phone, and you can use them safely anywhere. Well, we'll see how "safe" is in a moment because security is just one of the strong points that a healthcare app should have.

So what aspects do you need to pay attention to if you want to build one? Let's see.

First things, first: Types of healthcare apps

There are various types of apps related to the Health sector, some more general, others more specific, but we can classify them into two big categories:

1. Apps used by healthcare providers. These are usually present in hospitals or labs, storing medical data or acting as companions to medical devices. They are only accessible to the authorized staff, not the general public.

2. Apps used by patients. These apps are present on our phones, assisting us with our medical treatment or general advice. We can also use them to make appointments or talk to our doctors, but more about that in a minute.

Now that we have an idea about the general types of healthcare apps, let's continue with the checklist we mentioned at the beginning: what to consider when building one.

1. Take security & privacy very seriously

Such a surprise, right? When it comes to medical data, there's no room for errors. We're talking about sensitive information that needs to be protected.

Indeed, the mobile side usually doesn't store such data; most of it is in the cloud, in a database. However, the app itself can offer access to that sensitive information, and it is this access that we need to protect. We cover this in depth in our guide on mobile app security, but here are a few tips:

• Encrypt sensitive data (like access tokens)
• Use only HTTPS when communicating with the backend side
• Limit the number of dependencies and requested access permissions

On the privacy side, there are regulations you must obey when creating a healthcare app, and which ones depend on where your users are.

If you serve US users and store personal information that can identify people (like a date of birth), you must be HIPAA compliant. HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a collection of rules about how you record, store, and manage a person's protected health information (PHI) electronically. It has three major components: the privacy rule, the security rule, and the breach notification rule.

If you serve EU, Irish, or UK users, health data is "special-category" data under GDPR (and UK GDPR), which requires an explicit lawful basis, data-minimisation, and strong safeguards. Building these in from the start is far cheaper than retrofitting them before a funding round or hospital procurement. As an ISO 27001 and ISO 9001-certified company, Wolfpack Digital approaches healthcare projects with privacy-by-design from day one.

2. Know your target audience

We're talking about apps that serve a specific purpose, so it's crucial to know who will be part of your audience. That's because you can tailor the app itself to those people better:

• Increased font size and contrast if the average age is higher
• Colors and animations if it's an app for children or young people in general
• Multi-language support if you're targeting multiple countries or a country with more than one spoken language
• Accessibility features for people with disabilities

Accessibility is no longer just good practice in the EU. Since 28 June 2025, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) makes WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility a legal requirement for many consumer-facing apps, and healthcare, telehealth, and remote-monitoring apps are squarely in scope. We cover this in detail in our European Accessibility Act guide.

The list goes on, but we'll handle the UI/UX part in a separate section below.

3. Focus on communication with professionals

An app alone can be helpful, but to take it to the next level you need to let patients interact with healthcare professionals easily. Many hospital visits are for simple problems or questions that could be solved over the phone or with a video call. So, how to improve your app's communication level?

• Real-time text chat with a doctor
• An AI-powered chatbot
• Schedule and perform a video call with a healthcare professional
• Asynchronous messages between the doctor and the patient on specific topics

Features like these can make your app stand out from others while creating a pleasant user experience. Speaking about user experience...

4. Ensure a beautiful design and engaging user experience

Medical apps don't need to be boring and formal. To keep users engaged and happy, you need to pay attention to how you design your app and the user interaction. The goal should be to provide an elegant and smooth user experience throughout the entire app.

It starts with the first impression your app makes and continues through every feature you offer. The list of good UI/UX practices is long, so see our healthcare design guide on privacy-by-design and what a design system is to go deeper.

What is the future of healthcare apps?

It's hard to say where healthcare apps are heading because most of today's "hot topics" can be used in the health industry as well:

• Artificial Intelligence: beyond chatbots, AI has long been used in medicine for disease prediction and helping doctors with diagnoses, and AI-native development is now also speeding up how these apps get built. One thing to plan for: under the EU AI Act, medical AI used for diagnosis, clinical decision support, triage, or patient monitoring is classified high-risk, with obligations phasing in from August 2026 (and later dates for AI embedded in regulated medical devices). If your app's AI performs a medical function, factor compliance in early.
• Augmented Reality: especially in apps for healthcare providers, enhancing their daily work with supportive features like annotations or real-time data. It can also prove invaluable as a teaching tool for the next generations of healthcare professionals
• Internet of Things: apps that connect to medical devices via Bluetooth, plus features like indoor navigation in large hospitals using beacons, or room-control features (temperature, humidity, etc.). See our guide to IoT use cases.

There's also a growing category of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) — software that performs a medical function in its own right and carries its own regulatory weight.

The important thing is to pay attention to the aspects above while striving to create a unique, helpful experience for your audience. In the end, it's about solving problems and making life easier and better.

If you're looking for a technical partner with healthcare experience, let's get in touch. Wolfpack Digital has built health products across Europe — from medical-record and telehealth apps to compliance-grade tools — and you can explore our healthtech work, our lessons from building healthtech apps, and the top healthtech startups in Ireland in this area.