How to Create a Veterinary App in 2022? Cost, Process & Regulations

During the COVID-19 pandemic, pet owners were isolated from clinics just like people. But they are often worried about the health of their pets, providing the best care they can. Luckily, the era of digital transformation works for everyone, including pet owners, and allows them to easily control the health of their furry friends. 

Today’s veterinary applications offer 24×7 pet care facilities to animal owners helping them to keep their worries at bay. And there is an immense demand for these solutions, as not everyone can go to the veterinarian every time their pet eats something on the street and so on. 

The global veterinary telehealth market size was estimated at USD 119.6 million last year and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.6% from this year to 2030. Experts believe that the growing adoption of these management systems can be linked to the steady growth in the focus on veterinary telehealth along with more smart disease detection. 

In addition, the prevalence of zoonotic and chronic diseases in pets, as well as the rising adoption of IoT & AI by pet applications, are some of the major drivers for the market growth in 2022. The increasing number of health issues like diabetes, kidney diseases, spinal disc problems, and blood pressure-related diseases seem to further fuel the market.

In this article, we will explain how to create a veterinary app, what steps are needed, the cost of the development, and also shed light on government regulations.

What is Telemedicine for Pets?

A veterinary app is software that helps pet owners take care of their furry friends in the best way possible, managing the health of animals without leaving their homes. The goal of this application is to offer pet owners health-related services and information. Depending on the type of the app, this software can be integrated with a pet tracking system, medicine prescription, video vet consultation, and seamless search. In addition, some apps are also powered by Artificial Intelligence/Internet of Things (IoT) tools to enhance pet healthcare.

How Does Vet Telemedicine Work?

Veterinary telemedicine services work in the same way as human telemedicine. Pet owners can request a visit, entering the data about their pet’s health condition, name, age, weight, and so on. The veterinarian chooses the available date and schedules an online visit to discuss the animal’s care. Depending on the health condition, the doctor can either provide a diagnosis and recommendations online or schedule a physical visit to the clinic when required. 

The most basic type of telemedicine vet service is a phone call. However, some applications can also use software tools and other types of equipment to offer more in-depth care in a remote world. Everything users need to use this software is a smartphone, laptop, or tablet.

Benefits of Veterinarian App

Provide a Robust Engagement Channel

As a veterinary doctor or a clinic providing these services, you want to stay in demand in the long term and take a more holistic approach to patient engagement. Mobile applications are a great way for this purpose. These apps provide robust communication channels that can greatly help you on this front. 

To be more specific, a well thought mobile application could bring a significant difference to your practice as they are gaining immense popularity every day, and this trend doesn’t seem to stop. Applications allow you to easily boost patient engagement by furnishing user-friendly features. You can also add personalized follow-up messages, push notifications, e-prescriptions, or treatment/medication reminders to keep users engaged and increase the retention rate.

Help Streamline Provider-Patient Communication

Communication is usually a complex task when it comes to veterinary care. Since pets can’t express their problems vocally, only parents are able to effectively communicate with the doctor to keep in touch with care providers to ensure the best possible care.

This is where accurate, fast and timely communication can become the key to ameliorating outcomes. However, traditional visits are not enough to make sure pets are getting quality care. Mobile applications are a great way to solve this issue, providing an effective communication tool and improving the overall quality of veterinary services.

Effective Tool to Educate Pet Owners

Lack of education among pet owners is a great issue that causes many problems for veterinarians and pets as well. When it comes to healthcare, engagement and education often go hand-in-hand.

Therefore, patient education plays an important role in how veterinary work today as our patients aren’t the ones who will be asked during the examination. The better your app is able to educate pet owners, the better they can do on their part to ensure treatment adherence.

Better education is also linked with other valuable benefits, including the following ones:

• Less prescription abandonment thanks to a better understanding of why the drug is essential for the pet;
• More follow-through visits due to understanding of the pet’s disease;
• Patient education means higher satisfaction with the visit;

Must-Have Features of Veterinarian App

Appointment Scheduling

Appointment scheduling features will make the use of your app and the life of pet owners much easier. Based on the 2020 Kyruus report, 48% of clients book healthcare appointments by phone, while 43% prefer online scheduling.

Giving pet owners a chance to book appointments right in the app means they can do it any time of the day when they are free. This will show how you care about your users, and you give them freedom in choices, which boosts loyalty and retention rates. 

This is why we advise you to add multiple time slots when considering vet consultation app development, allowing clients to select an appropriate time. To be more specific, your app should also be integrated with third-party calendar apps and scheduling software. This will help users always remember about their visit and save money for the clinics.

Notifications

Automated notifications can work as handy reminders for both doctors and pet owners about the visit, vaccinations, and other care activities. At the same time, these features can also notify users about pet feeding times, walks, physical activities, or habit changes. Notifications are great for informing users about discounts, promos, payments, and new product launches.

Veterinary applications can send notifications in various ways, including email, text messages, and push notifications right on their phone. However, it is always best to give users a choice on what type of notification they want to get so you won’t ruin the whole experience.

Live Chat

Even though not every veterinarian app requires live chat, if you want to build a telemedicine solution, then this will be an essential feature. A live chat is an excellent choice for pet owners to discuss diet recommendations and ask about small changes in their pets, medications, and current diagnoses.

The chat feature should also allow users to send photos and videos, making the process for doctors easier. If the diagnosis is unclear and cannot be identified via chat, the doctor can either schedule an online call or a visit to the clinic.

Video Calls

Advanced video call features in a veterinarian app for doctors allow your clinic to provide these well-known telemedicine services. Your doctors can use the application to do the following things:

• Consult pet owners via video calls;
• Examine pets and give instructions (like checking the pet’s skin and heart rate or showing how the pet walks or runs);
• Identify treatment progress and post-surgery checkups;
• Diagnose conditions and give prescriptions;
• Record video calls (to study them later or discuss with their supervisors).

Digital Payments

Since the whole idea of the telemedicine app is to make it possible for pet owners to care about their pets without leaving their homes, clients shouldn’t experience any difficulties with online payment. Thereby, you will need to think about integrating bank card processing (credit or debit) as well as secure payment gateways (Braintree or Paypal) to your web and mobile apps.

Administrative Management

Any in-demand veterinary app should include administrative features that help large clinics and hospitals easily manage their businesses. The administrative part of the software can be made up of tools like:

• Vet doctors performance
• Task monitoring
• User management
• Templates to streamline processes
• Inventory and product management
• Reporting and analytics

Steps of Development Veterinarian App

Concept and Business Strategy 

Before you start vet app development, you should first identify your idea and concept and create a detailed business strategy. This involves market analysis, learning about your competitors, exploring the market, finding your niche, and so on. You should also choose the monetization method if you want to get the revenue out of the app. At this stage, you need to cover all the aspects and important parameters.

Requirement Analysis

This stage is essential as it helps you to create a list of requirements and features. This phase works as a base for further app development and is essential if you are going to hire an experienced development company to help them quickly start the process without wasting time on extra research.

App Design and UI/UX Development

Once you have figured out all requirements and features, you are ready to move to UX/UI development. This should be done by your design team according to the requirement analysis document. 

Develop an MVP 

Before you can develop the final product, you should first test your idea on the market. This is why you should consider starting with an MVP, which can be tested by a group of people to get feedback. This version of the app should contain only key features and basic design, so users can test how it works and you get insights on further development.

Quality Assurance

Once you developed the MVP, tested it, and got the final product, you will need to test the product with quality assurance experts. They will access the code and mitigate all the issues and potential bugs to improve the quality of the app in advance and make it easier for you to enter the market.

Launch the Final Product & Maintain

Once the final product is approved, you can launch your app to the market. However, it is essential to maintain and update your app alongside user feedback and market trends. This will help you quickly make changes if someone reports bugs and also keep users engaged in the long term.

Regulations to Follow

When you want to build a vet telemedicine app, you may wonder: does HIPAA apply to veterinarians? Below you will see the list of the regulations you need to follow when building a veterinarian application. 

• FFDCA
• FDA
• AVMA
• HIPAA

How Much Does it Cost to Build a Veterinary App?

To create a top-notch quality veterinarian app, you first need a team of professional developers, QAs, designers, and others who can lead you to success. Hire a company that offers healthcare development services and has enough experience in this niche to ensure compliance with the industry’s laws. The app cost will depend on the physical location of the developers, the numbers needed to develop the product, the complexity of the app, and other things. However, when we take an average app, the cost can be between $70k and $150k. But it is best to hire a full team of developers rather than freelancers or create your in-house team. 

Interexy’s Experience

Interexy is one of the most trusted app development companies on the market with a great experience in telemedicine app development. We have developed a Penn Vet – a brand-new veterinarian app that our team made from scratch to help the client realize his idea for further usage. 

The idea of the product is to help animal shelters that constantly struggle with documentation. The app is made up of all the needed features to make the work of shelters easy and convenient. The application’s functionality is hassle-free and efficient, making it quick and simple for veterinarians to manage their document work and reduce time-laboring tasks easily.

Now users are available to:

• Create a digital version of the shelter;
• Register the animal to enter the shelter (name, age, health condition);
• Analyze the pet’s health according to many questions provided.

The final product has already been tested by the first group of people that left positive reviews mentioning the app’s functionality, design, and ease of use. 

Final Thoughts

Like human telemedicine, veterinarian applications are in great demand now due to restrictions and the global switch to digital format. This is why businesses and clinics are starting to build their software to boost engagement, attract attention, gain revenue and stay in demand in the long term. However, you need to know what the process is and what to consider when building this app. If you have any questions or want to discuss your idea, book a free call with our experts!

FAQs

What is a vet app?

A vet app is software that allows pet owners to consult with veterinarians online and care about their pets more efficiently.

How does vet telemedicine work?

Pretty much as a human one does. It allows users to book an online call with a veterinarian and get qualified help online.

How much does it cost to build a veterinary app?

The price depends on many factors but usually varies between $70k and $150k.