6 Ways to Market Your Doctor’s Office with a Mobile App
For the first few years, you need to build your medical practice’s base of patients. Later, people will lead their friends and relatives to you by themselves. But how can you go about promoting yourself as a doctor at the very beginning? Even more importantly, how can you turn one-time patients into regular patients?
Let’s discuss how apps for doctor appointments can help your business. There are many ways to promote your doctor’s office. You can create your own blog, post Q&A sessions on YouTube, and dive into social media marketing. You can also partner with healthcare industry representatives from hospitals, pharmaceutical companies or insurance providers. Providing content and promoting yourself on the internet is great, but building your own strong brand requires more than that. Many doctors are already planning to create a doctor scheduling app, if they haven’t already. Let’s explore, why and what for.
Why develop an app for your doctor’s office?
After you attract patients with your content, ads, and partnerships with local companies, you’ll need to retain them. Services and products that exceed expectations will win you loyal patients for life, that’s why many clinics, hospitals, and individual doctors create doctor scheduling apps and telemedicine solutions.
A mobile app is great for marketing, but it’s also a useful tool on its own that’s able to bring instant benefits to your patients. This value from doctor appointment app development is something that will make them return to you again. In this article, we’ll show you how a mobile app can market your doctor’s office.
Let’s discuss what marketing and operational value mobile-specific features can bring to your medical practice, and how you can build up a client base for a doctor’s office with a mobile app.
6 ways to use an app for your doctor’s office
Here are six marketing ideas for doctors office you can use to attract and retain patients for your medical practice.
1. Allow patients to book appointments online
Booking a doctor’s appointment online from a mobile device is fast and convenient. A mobile app can allow your patients to choose a convenient day and time for an appointment using a calendar that shows free slots.
2. Remind patients about their appointments and inform them of updates
A mobile application will allow you to reach out to your patients wherever they are. You can automate reminders and forget about having to call people individually.
3. Share videos and tutorials within your application
Demonstrate your expertise through videos and tutorials that help patients lead healthier lives. This will surely require effort, but will also make you stand out among other doctors.
You can easily link your application to your YouTube account or any other video service you use to share content with your patients.
4. Make personalized offers to your patients
With the help of analytics and in-app notifications, you can inform users of special offers. You can also segment your patients by age, gender, and other parameters and send them personalized notifications.
5. Consult your patients remotely with text and video chats
Often, people choose to ignore minor health issues because they don’t have time to go to a doctor in person. A mobile application can help them get the consultation they need or take the first step toward an actual appointment.
If you want to exceed your patients’ expectations and make your service outstanding, provide remote consultations. This will encourage people to contact you and come to you in person later. Moreover, it’s simply a service that people will definitely appreciate.
6. Provide on-demand doctor 24/7 service
This feature will probably cause some changes in your business operations, for example, require you to hire doctors to work additional shifts. This service is a great addition to your app, that will make it more of a full-fledged telemedicine solution. With this feature, you’ll be able to extend your existing practice and attract more patients.
7. Help patients find the way to your office
Integrate simple maps to show your patients the way to your doctor’s office. You can just show your location or allow users to see the route to your office from where they are.
These are six ways to market doctor’s office by using a mobile app. You can choose some of these features to make a fast release to app stores. After you get feedback, you can gradually improve your app by adding others. Now let’s talk about features you’ll need to promote doctors office with a mobile app.
Doctor’s office app features
Now let’s see what features are used in marketing for doctors offices. Note that you don’t have to include all these features in your mobile application: start with a simple informational app and gradually add more valuable features that will make your service outstanding.
Calendar with office hours and appointment schedule
A calendar should show your work schedule and dynamically reflect all changes your patients make. This means patients need to have the ability to book an appointment, after which other patients will see that this time in your schedule is now taken.
Maps
Integrate Google Maps or Apple Maps into the mobile application for your doctor’s office to show users your exact location. If you want, you can also add the ability to navigate to your office from within the app.
Push notifications
After a patient books an appointment, they should receive a notification. You can also send notifications prior to an appointment to remind patients about it, or send notifications when you release a new article or video.
News feed
If you produce content such as videos, articles, tutorials, or podcasts, you need to show them to the world and include them in a news feed. Allow users to get valuable healthcare information in a format they’re used to.
Text and video chats
Provide remote consultations for your patients with text and video chats. You can integrate messengers and open-source technology into your app that will provide you with this functionality through APIs.
If you choose to share personal healthcare data in text messages, you need to make sure your app is secure and compliant with regulations such as HIPAA (for US) or GDPR (for Europe).
Analytics
Analytics is an important part of your marketing activities, as it gives you an idea of how people are responding. With analytics, you can not only see how your app performs technically but also the way users behave in your app and what they’re most interested in.
After you get feedback, you can gradually improve your app by adding more advanced features that your patients value most
Social media integration
Testimonials are an important part of any medical practice. Until you have a steady stream of patients that recommend you to their friends and family, you’ll need to rely on reviews and provide social proof of your professional skills. Integrate social media into your app and allow users to leave and share reviews of you as a doctor.
Wearables integration
If your patients use wearables to lead healthy lives or you need data from wearables to provide them better health-related recommendations, you can add compatibility to wearables into your mobile app.
Apart from features, you’ll also need to think about design, paid services (e.g. maps) and platforms (Android, iOS or both). The design should be integral with your website’s design, if you have one. After the app is live, you’ll need to support and update it.
3 best doctor office apps
Though doctor office apps are different from telemedicine applications, you can still get inspiration from the best doctor appointment app solutions out there.
Teladoc
Teladoc is one of the best app for doctor appointments, that allows patients to get care at any time and from anywhere. Teladoc offers text and video chats, and provide patients with the ability to get diagnosed remotely as well as get prescriptions right away in the app.
Doctor On Demand
This doctor appointment app also offers 24/7 online consultations for patients, as well as a blog with articles on issues that bother patients the most often. The selling point of Doctor on Demand is that it’s available to everyone, and you can use it even if you don’t have health insurance.
MDLIVE: Talk to a Doctor 24/7
MDLive offers online consultations on non-emergency issues like colds and flu, fever, ear, eye and skin issues, infections, allergies and more. They also offer help on mental issues such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, postpartun depression, PTSD and more.
Conclusion
There are many ways to promote yourself as a physician, and a mobile app is one of them. A mobile app for a doctor’s office is a long-term investment that will bring you new patients and make existing patients return to you again and again.
If you want to know more about how to market doctors offices, or you plan to build a doctor appointment app for your practice, be sure to contact us. We’ll consider your needs and meet them with our technical expertise and development experience.
Dec 01, 2022
6520 views 
