Mental Health App Development: Trends & Cost

Mental health diseases are on the rise worldwide. The dynamic changes in societal behaviour and ageing factors are the main contributors to this steady increase. As a result, long-term mental health issues and depression which is one of the leading causes of these problems.

Of course, to deal with depression, anxiety and stress, the first priority is to see the doctor, but what if the visitor is in quarantine, or the therapist himself is reserved only for emergencies? How do you deal with that?

A mental health app development can literally become a boon at this time. It can become a life-save under such situations. Nowadays, due to COVID-19 people tend to put career as their top-most priority, but pay little attention to their mental health. This is also one of the reasons why the demand for mental healthcare services has increased and the mental health of up to 36% more people has been impacted negatively.

Many businesses have chosen a mental health app as their next titular product. So if you want to build your own mental health app, you are welcome to this blog.

What to Consider Before Developing a Mental Health App?

Engagement

Encouraging user engagement in a mental health app is a bit challenging. Of course, patients understand its usability, but it is not a good enough motivation to keep them engaged. Moreover, mental health apps usually rely on health experts who have more important work for their patient's well-being. So you cannot expect them to grow the engagement rate of your app.

In order to encourage more people to use your app on a regular basis, you can go for gamification features. You can include:

Reward points

Health achievement trophies

Coupons

Cashback

Self-improvement sessions

Fitness quiz

The end goal of a mental health app is and should always be to help patients and help them in overcoming their disorders. So whenever you implement gamification features, make sure they don’t become frustrating for users.

Workflow Automation

The entire process should be automated in a manner that not only reduces the workload on doctors but also provides the same amount of comfort to its users. To that end, you can include automation in:

Registration of patients

Appointment booking

Payments processing

Daily health report

Prescription automation

Compliance with Regulatory/Law Bodies

One of the most important things that need to be done is law bodies compliance. It also includes where the patients/doctors come from or the status of their citizenship as per the country in which they use the app. It totally depends on demographic and health conditions.

HIPAA and PIPEDA are two widely recognised compliances:

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law of the USA that came into effect to protect health-related data of any standards. When it comes to developing a mental health app, it is a major privacy law that must be considered. In HIPAA, there are complete explanatory lists that define who and when needs to comply with it.

Like HIPAA, PIPEDA is a data privacy law in Canada that clearly expresses a relevant security framework for organisations.

App Security

Information security is such a hot topic that no one can underestimate it. When you decide to set foot in mental health services, you need to pay heed to data/information security. You must ensure you implement the highest standards of encryption. You can implement:

Multi-factor authentication during account log-ins or while accessing crucial data such as EHRs. There are many types of authentication that can be used to multiply the security. You can implement biometric authentication like fingerprints, also security tokens, voice recognition, OTP (one-time passcode) Face ID and call verification.

Additionally, adding end-to-end encryption is also recommended. End-to-end encryption makes sure nobody reads or listens to your messages or conversations except the sender and the receiver.

Push Fraud Notifications

You can go push fraud notifications to advance the app further. In fact, such notifications can be helpful when suspicious activity is detected on the app. Push fraud notifications notify the users in real-time and build healthy relationships with them.

Mental health development is an ideal choice to generate six or seven digital revenue. Since people with mental disorders like stress, PTSD or anxiety, they are sensitive to privacy and information security. Therefore, it is a must before anything.

Trends

Mental health trends in the USA are quite alarming.

• There is an increase of 4.35% over the past 6 years in depression.
• More than 2.5 million of the nation's youth require treatment for depression.
• Suicidal ideations continue to increase.
• Over half of adults with a mental illness lack treatment.
• Only 1 in 3 youth with severe depression disorder receive consistent mental health care.
• 11.1% of Americans lack adequate insurance coverage including adults and youths.
• Mental health app development is projected to grow by 23.7% by 2027.

Cost

Even a few features in a mental health app may sound quite challenging, but if you hire leading app development companies, you can simplify the development process. If I talk about app development cost, it may vary and actually depends on a number of factors such as:

• What features would you be needing and how complex are they?
• The technology of mental health app development. Is it for Native or cross-platform?
• The use of 3rd party plugins, extensions and additional APIs.
• The hourly rate or the project basis rate of the development team.
• Do you need future upgrades or do you have a particular functionality to include in the app?

Hiring a good app development team is not as challenging as it may sound at first. However, these are some of the common factors that will determine the cost of an entire mental health app development project.

Conclusion

A mental health app can significantly simplify the process of treatment and be more convenient for patients to get in touch with health experts in real-time. On the other hand, by having a mental health app as their prime product, businesses can ensure their future success.