Everything You Need to Know Before You Start Developing a Pharmacy App

Pharmacy app development is one of the elements driving healthcare advancement. Pharmaceutical apps make managing medication easier and more affordable for diverse patient groups. The global digital pharmacy market is expected to grow at a 9.5% CAGR between 2023 and 2030. Launching a pharmacy app comes with numerous advantages. They include better customer service and engagement, operational efficiency, revenue generation, and more.

These benefits, together with the market state, make pharmacy application development a good business idea. However, enthusiasm always goes hand in hand with challenges and concerns. For example, you’ll need to figure out how to create an app that’s both easy to use and safe. Even with minimum functionality, you’ll get a bunch of regulations to follow. So, is it worth the trouble?

We can explain how app development works so you can decide objectively. At Exoft, we know the challenges of health tech development perfectly. Our team has a wealth of experience creating solutions for doctors, patients, and institutions worldwide. This app development guide will help you better understand domain particularities, development hurdles, and how the process goes.

Must-Have Features for a Pharmacy App

Pharmacy app software development is a lengthy and complex process. To get through it, don’t aim to release a “perfect” product. Instead, outline the basic, business-critical features and start implementing them.

Registration & Login

Allow users to register in your app and create full-fledged profiles. Keep these flows simple. Require as little information as possible. Set rules that instruct on creating secure passwords.

Profile Management

Add sections for a personalized health profile and medication history. Leave them optional to fill in (if it aligns with the app’s logic). Let users add, delete, and edit the information they have shared at any step of the app’s usage.

Prescription Management

Ensure users can attach e-prescriptions or scan their paper equivalents when ordering drugs. It will also keep pharmacists confident that they aren’t breaking any regulations.

Categorization & Search

Design logical categorization of medication. Create an in-app search and make it easy to locate on the screen. They will let patients navigate freely from the first interaction with your app.

Drug Availability

Make sure a person can see whether they can order a specific item early on. If a user learns that the medication they need is unavailable as late as the payment stage, they will likely get annoyed, distressed, or furious.

Price Comparison

Design a price comparison feature. You can implement it through sorting – by showing results with prices from lower to higher. Consider adding a comparison for drugs with identical composition or for the same problem.

Pharmacy Locator

Enable pharmacy finder and location tracking. It’ll be helpful for users to see where exactly a chosen pharmacy is situated regarding their location, regardless of the chosen delivery method.

Online Ordering

Create an algorithm for order tracking with corresponding status updates. Let the user know their order has been received, is being prepared, or it’s time to pick it up, etc. Consider adding driver tracking for courier delivery.

Drug Information

Add drug descriptions and instructions in the app. People will be able to read important notes before buying medicine and have access to this information whenever they need it.

Payment Gateway

Integrate a secure payment gateway in your app. You can suggest several payment options for both convenience and risk diversification, but online payment should be among them.

Notification System

Show updates about order statuses. Send notifications on pill availability, discounts, and other additional features. Allow people to select which notification to leave turned on.

Support & Feedback Mechanisms

Have in-app support for managing problems with orders and resolving other issues. Allow users to leave reviews and view feedback regarding different pharmacies and medicines. It adds credibility.

Additional Features for Enhanced User Experience

Now, let’s look at several other features patients will enjoy having. They are for the post-MVP stage and can wait until later releases. But they will undoubtedly strengthen your app and give it a few competitive advantages.

Pill Reminders & Tracking

Integrating this functionality into a pharmacy will facilitate re-ordering medication and analyzing adherence and effectiveness. A more sophisticated implementation will help prevent safety risks, such as intake exceeding the permitted period.

Safety Alerts

If there’s an opportunity to track and analyze medicine intakes, enhance this functionality with safety mechanisms. Besides control over the maximum intake period, an application can get a drug interaction checker. It is also a powerful feature capable of preventing severe dangers to a patient’s health.

Health Data Monitoring

With health data tracking and symptom monitoring, people can manage refills and medication processes in general. This is especially effective for chronic disease management, allergy control, and other familiar or “predictable” conditions.

Personalized Recommendations

They will be helpful for patients with chronic conditions. Also, this functionality can be used during marketing campaigns to target specific groups of users. You can tailor promotions and discounts and build engagement and retention strategies based on prior purchases or health data that the app can legally access.

In-App Consultations

They are not the core things to have in a pharmacy app, but many will find them helpful. With symptoms recorded and a professional available via chat or call, users can quickly order the right medicine for their condition.

Additional Resources

You can write competent articles together with healthcare professionals. Try linking them to reliable third-party resources, such as academic articles, various educational content, etc., in this section. Educating your audience will help bust some myths and add extra value.

Regulatory Compliance and Security for Pharma Apps

Unsurprisingly, the healthcare industry is one of the most strictly regulated. Pharmaceutical app development opens many opportunities for tech companies. It also assigns higher-than-average complexity to the process.

Regulation Overview

Let’s start by learning about several important documents. You will need to research your target region and make a list of regulations to follow before writing product requirements. Below are a few items to start with.

HIPAA

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a US federal law addressing various aspects of healthcare, insurance, and patient health information. HIPAA involves administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect sensitive data. Compliance with it is obligatory. Any violations can cause severe penalties or even criminal charges.

CSA

The Controlled Substances Act is another federal law. It was created as part of the broader initiative to combat drug abuse and regulate substances that have the potential for dependency. CSA regulates the manufacture, importation, possession, use, and distribution of certain substances. It allows balancing access to medication for legitimate medical purposes while preventing drug misuse, trafficking, and diversion for illicit purposes.

GDPR, CCPA, PIPEDA

There are laws that aim to protect individuals’ privacy rights beyond the medical sphere. They establish guidelines and requirements for businesses and organizations regarding collecting, processing, and protecting personal information. These are, for example, the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, the California Consumer Privacy Act in the US, and PIPEDA in Canada.

FDA

The Food and Drug Administration regulates and supervises food safety, medications, vaccines, medical devices, cosmetics, veterinary products, and more. They also have a list of requirements for digital healthcare solutions launched in the USA.

HL7

HL7 (Health Level Seven) is a non-profit organization that develops standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. Their guidelines for messaging, clinical documentation architecture, interoperability between systems and devices, etc., are widely used by healthcare providers worldwide.

Accessibility Standards

Last but not least, there’s digital accessibility. These standards aim to ensure that digital content and applications are usable and accessible to all individuals, including those with disabilities. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is the most widely accepted document for web accessibility. There are also local acts and laws various businesses and tech companies must comply with.

Significance of Data Privacy and Security

It’s not a secret that data privacy and security are critical for all healthcare apps. So, we won’t dive into details but just remind you about a few main points:

• Pharma apps deal with sensitive health data, including medical history, prescriptions, and health conditions.
• Unauthorized access to personal health information can have severe consequences, including identity theft, fraud, or misuse of medical data.
• Technology providers should approach patient data security and confidentiality seriously to build user trust.
• Most countries have strict regulations for the protection of health-related data. Non-compliance can result in legal penalties or worse.
• Data breaches in pharma apps can result in serious issues for a company, including financial loss, reputational damage, and legal liabilities.

Building a secure and privacy-oriented app sets a strong foundation for its long-term viability in the market. Treating patient data carelessly, on the contrary, wouldn’t make it in demand.

Best Practices for Compliance and Security

This issue calls for a separate article or even a series of articles. We’ll share a list that will be sufficient to start with:

• Data minimization. Collect and retain only necessary data. Implement strict access controls and role-based permissions.
• Compliance. Follow industry standards and regulations. Stay updated with changes, and make sure to adapt the application.
• Encryption. Implement end-to-end encryption for data transmitted between users and servers. It will ensure data privacy and prevent unauthorized access.
• Infrastructure. Choose reliable solutions for backend infrastructure, data transmission, payment processing, and vendor management.
• Authentication. Use multi-factor authentication or similar methods to secure accounts and the sensitive information they contain.
• Development. Analyze the working process for vulnerabilities and eliminate them. Organize regular security training for your team.
• Security audits. Conduct regular security audits and penetration testing to identify vulnerabilities. Always have a strategy to address them.

Start implementing privacy and security principles from the early stages of the app development. Hence, safety will become integral to the app’s architecture and features. With continuous monitoring and response strategy, you’ll have nothing to worry about.

Pharmacy App Development Process Step-by-Step

Software development isn’t always perfectly predictable. You often need to adjust the little things and handle unexpected details. However, if everything is planned well, the scale of the “unexpected” gets down to a minimum. As for the process, it always follows the same steps.

1. Market Research & Idea Validation

Check the healthcare app trends . Analyze the pros and cons of the existing pharmacy apps. Learn a bit about your target audience. After this, you’ll be able to see if there’s a niche for your product. Come up with a specific concept for a future app and analyze it against the health tech landscape. Before you proceed with the development, consider your app's place on the market and its future scaling.

2. Requirement Design & Planning

The product team starts designing the requirements. It’s best to document functionality in detail in a single document. It will facilitate work with the product for the entire team later, including developers, QA engineers, and decision-makers. With this document, you can plan the development more accurately. As you have a list of features to code, you can define how much time you will need in different team configurations.

3. UX & UI Design

With data gathered during the research stage, you can create user personas – schematic representations of several key groups of your potential customers. Their needs, pains, and experience with technology will help you create the feature logic. When the team develops flows – steps to complete specific tasks in the app – UX designers prepare the schematic layout of the product. This process is known as wireframing.

Only then follows what people commonly call “design” – UI, or user interface. UI designers wrap the logic into a more visually pleasant and understandable form. Wireframes are interactive, but these are grayscale lines and boxes. With UI design, you get a mockup – an app’s visual draft with screens that look like they will after release.

4. Frontend & Backend Coding

The number of developers in your team may vary depending on the deadline and available budget. The minimum squad includes a backend and a frontend software engineer in charge of the logic and visual design accordingly. If you decide to follow an Agile methodology, the team will develop your pharma app in small iterations, adding new features every 2-4 weeks.

5. Quality Assurance

The purpose of QA is to manage and prevent quality risks at all stages of product existence. The earlier QA engineers are involved in the process, the better. Testing is basically a close interaction with software aimed at detecting errors, unintended behaviors, logic gaps – anything that can interfere with user experience. With early testing, it is easier to prevent serious issues. It also becomes cheaper to fix defects.

6. Pharmacy Application Release

How do you tell if the software is ready for release? At some point, the team will conclude that:

• The core functionality is completed as per the requirements.
• It doesn’t have critical bugs, meaning nothing makes the app “unusable.”
• The software meets the acceptance criteria that mark its suitability for users.
• The marketing activities are set up and ready to run.

If you have a match, it’s time to launch the product. Don’t wait until it’s “perfect,” no matter what this word means to you. It will only postpone the release without good reason to do so.

7. Post-Launch Support & Maintenance

Some bugs will pop up only after the release, and that’s fine. Users will reach out with questions and complaints. Addressing this feedback will allow you to improve the application and build a loyal audience. Ongoing support is also required to adjust the app’s performance to a growing customer base, keep up with security regulations, and manage operating system updates.

8. Marketing Activities & User Acquisition

It’s best to launch awareness campaigns even before launching the product. Use the information you’ve gathered during the research to address the pains of your target audience. Emphasize the advantages of exploiting your application to deal with these problems. User acquisition is a continuous process. You’ll need to engage with the target audience through various channels and update your offers according to their needs.

These are the stages for building a pharmacy application. From planning and designing to making it work and fixing problems after the launch, every step is equally important. The Exoft team can support you throughout the entire development process up until marketing.

Technology Stack for Pharmaceutical App Development

The tech talent you have in the team defines the project’s success. You will need experts familiar with the following technologies:

• Backend development: Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby on Rails, and PHP.
• Frontend development: HTML and CSS; JavaScript, TypeScript.
• Mobile development: React Native, Flutter (for cross-platform apps), Swift, HealthKit (for native iOS apps), Kotlin, and Java (for native Android apps).
• Database management systems: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB for handling health records, user data, and app information.

The list above covers the basic app functionality. You’ll also need APIs, third-party integrations, and cloud solutions for everything to function properly. These can include:

• Registration and log-in: Facebook, Google, and AppleID for quick and convenient one-click registration.
• Cloud Services: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure for scalable and secure hosting infrastructure; AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage for storing data like images, documents, and backups securely; Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront for faster content delivery.
• Payment gateways: Stripe, PayPal, and Braintree for secure and convenient payment processing.
• Location services: Google Maps API and Mapbox for integrating maps and geolocation features.
• APIs by healthcare institutions, drug databases, or health-related platforms for accessing health information, drug databases, or telemedicine services.
• Notifications and messaging: Twilio, Firebase Cloud Messaging, or Pusher for real-time messaging and notifications.

You can finalize this list when you have detailed system and business requirements.

Approximate Cost of Pharmacy App Development

Every timeline and cost calculator for software development is approximate. You should always leave room for changes and extra expenses.

Factors Influencing the Cost of Pharma App Development

Just like with telemedicine software development , expenses depend heavily on the software’s features and complexity. But there are a few other factors that may impact the pharmacy app development cost:

• Compatibility: developing for multiple platforms (web and mobile, iOS and Android) or ensuring compatibility across various devices (laptops, phones, tablets).
• Tech stack: native app development will be more expensive than cross-platform development.
• Infrastructure: requirements for the backend infrastructure, databases, servers, APIs, and integrations with cloud services.
• Integrations: third-party services (other healthcare systems) and APIs (such as payment gateways, health databases, telemedicine platforms).
• Team: the size and composition of the product team (though rates also vary based on geographical location).
• Unforeseen: changes in project scope, additional features, or unexpected modifications resulting from a strategic pivot.

Other factors may cause deviations from the initial calculations. Thus, it’s safe to plan for extra expenses regardless of how stable the market is and how detailed your strategy is.

Budgeting Tips and Cost Optimization Strategies

How do you manage cost optimization besides allocating extra budget? Here are a few things you can do to cut expenses:

• Strictly follow your project plan. Use project management tools to control and enhance the team’s productivity. Don’t pivot unless it is critical for strategic success. Don’t change your feature scope or strategy on a whim.
• Have a proper QA strategy. It is crucial to test your product regularly. You’ll be able to detect errors and vulnerabilities early before they pile up and trigger a snowball effect. Also, bug fixing is cheaper in the early stages.
• Develop an MVP. Don’t strive to release a complex or ideal product. Proceed in small steps. Offer users an MVP, check how viable your pharma app is, and collect early feedback.
• Outsource the development. Developing a pharmacy app in-house is more expensive. With outsourcing, you can get an experienced team working at lower prices without compromising product quality.

Also, plan for risk diversification and handling. Understanding what dangers you can encounter saves your time and money. Otherwise, the team risks losing days or weeks of progress by being stuck when something unplanned happens.

Main Stages of Development and Their Prices

Monetization Strategies for Pharmaceutical Apps

Start thinking about monetization early on. You can look at what your competitors do but don’t have to follow their path. Don’t hesitate to borrow ideas from other niches. You might find something interesting there as well.

The most apparent monetization strategies for a pharmaceutical app are:

• Direct sales of prescription and over-the-counter medications.
• Subscription fees for premium services and features.
• Advertising and sponsored content partnerships.
• Data analytics and insights for targeted marketing.
• Partnerships with healthcare providers and insurance companies.
• Telemedicine and health consultation services.

You can get more creative at the user acquisition stage – when the main functionality is stable, and you are confident enough in the product’s quality to experiment with marketing. Partner with an insurance company and develop special plans for app users. Or you can launch sponsored health challenges or wellness programs with paid participation. There is much room for ideas, even in this strictly regulated niche.

Exoft’s Experience with Pharmacy Apps

Our team has a long history of working with various healthcare tech – from lab web portals to custom telemedicine platforms and clinic chain digitization. One of our pharma projects focuses on sustainability.

It is a multiple listing service for secure and compliant broker transactions between healthcare institutions and pharmaceutical companies. The platform connects siloed systems and redistributes medicines to balance their transfer between facilities and eliminate waste.

The co-founders of the project have engineering and pharmaceutical backgrounds. They came up with the concept of the software. The Exoft engineers helped implement it, getting the product out and live, and now are working to scale the service.

The Bottom Line

Now you know the essentials of building a pharmacy app: mandatory and optional features, industry guidelines and standards to follow, tech stack to use, and important details to account for. Using this guide, you can start preparing a roadmap for your own development process. It also provides a good background for starting a conversation with a tech team or outsourcing provider.

Creating a pharma app requires careful planning, design, and testing. And even with the best app ever created, you’ll need to put as much effort into marketing, promotion, user acquisition, and retention. It might seem overwhelming or exciting. But in any case, it all will be easier to implement with the right talent on your side.

If you’re ready to start looking for a pharmacy app development company, the Exoft team will be glad to discuss the realization of your idea. Your passion for healthcare digitization, backed by our domain expertise, can result in a great new pharma solution..