Since the application of technology to medicine and healthcare, the quality of life has increased. Doctors can easily monitor chronic diseases through the use of health applications on smartphones.
The benefits of apps in the health sector are so numerous that they have spurred creativity in providing healthcare solutions. Entrepreneurs are developing more apps targeted at providing healthcare solutions to people.
While some of these medical apps are targeted at the diagnosis, treatment, and maintenance of medical conditions that no app has been created for, others improve features of existing apps targeted at a medical condition.
This spells competition, and to ahead of the pack, you’d need to increase your medical app’s in-app engagement to keep your app useful and retain users.
We’ll show you just how to go about that in this article and reveal some relevant statistics in mhealth that you need to know to motivate you to improve your medical app constantly.
Medical Apps Statistics
When venturing into creating an app, you want to know whether the sector you’re picking is profitable enough – if it has enough prospects. You need not spend sleepless nights thinking about the profitability of medical apps. Statistics show that the sector has a high yield.
According to Statista, the total global mHealth market is predicted to reach nearly 100 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. This number indicates a fivefold increase from around 21 billion dollars in 2016.
Here are other relevant statistics regarding medical apps that you should know.
- The total market for mHealth apps is predicted to exceed 50 billion U.S. dollars in 2025, increasing massively from around two billion dollars in 2016.
- As of 2018, mobile health apps’ leading focus areas were health, productivity, and sport. Over 25 thousand apps were developed globally for these three subsectors.
- As of the last quarter of 2020, 48,608 iOS healthcare apps were available on the Apple store, representing a 6.15 percent increase over the previous quarter.
- As of the last quarter of 2020, there were 47,140 healthcare apps available on Google Play Store, representing a 1.68 percent increase over the previous quarter.
- About 64% of U.S. adults regularly use an app to measure health metrics.
- 71% of patients say it would be helpful for their physician to access the health data captured by their mobile app.
Tips for In-App Engagement
Were you inspired or frightened by the above statistics? Whichever the case was, these tips to increase the in-app engagement of your medical app would sort you out and grow your revenue.
Push Notifications
People can be so preoccupied that they forget they downloaded a specific app for a particular need. Push notification is your best tool to get them back to your app. However, you have to ensure that you send relevant push notifications and at intervals that don’t put in the impression of spamming your users.
For example, if you designed an app to help people exercise, you can send your users weekly notifications encouraging them to jog, walk, or do pushups. Videos on exercise routines or the latest research on exercising, or even notifications based on promotions that would interest your users, can help bring them back to your medical app and increase engagement.
Onboarding
Remember getting your new phone or laptop and how you wanted to get right into exploring every single fantastic feature? That’s the same feeling your users get after downloading your app. It is why you should pay attention to onboarding. While it is necessary to guide users on how to use the app during the onboarding process, the focus should be on getting users to experience the benefits of using your app as soon as possible.
If the user doesn’t have to fill in too many forms before getting started, it is easier for them to buy into the app and become loyal customers.
Giving Rewards
Giving rewards sound like something that food and drink apps, right? Don’t be deceived; almost everyone loves to be rewarded for using a particular service or reaching a specific milestone. You need to reward your medical app users from time to time but know that you have to be creative about your reward strategy.
An incentive that worked today may not work months later. You can reward users for partaking in additional tasks on the app. This is where gamifying your medical app becomes useful. Create your app to take the user through a journey with rewards after each stage of the journey.
Personalization
While you want to reach out to all your users at about the same time, you have to understand that they are unique people with varied needs. To successfully engage them, you need to personalize the information you send to them. You can create personalized stories based on your users’ feed, utilize intuitive Storyly templates to showcase and convert your users in the most personal way.
If you medical app automatically keeps track of the personal information your users provide, you can use this information to provide customized features, services, or benefits that would appeal to each user. This way, they are engaged and not leave your medical app for those of your competitors.
Connection to Real Consequences
More than rewards and incentives, ensure that your medical app connects positive health changes to real-life consequences. Suppose your app is designed to help patients control their blood pressure. In that case, it’s good to have a journal for recording nutritional information and connects the dots for them between a week of hitting specific health goals and recording lower blood pressure numbers. The app should then offer suggestions for improving numbers over the next week or month too. Nothing beats an app that provides real solutions to problems.
To sum up, we shared in this article some relevant statistics in mhealth that you need to know to motivate you to improve your medical app continually. Moreover, we shared some tips to increase in-app engagement. To learn more about statistics and engagement tips for other categories, you can read “Statistics & Tips for Entertainment Apps In-App Engagement”
