A Full Guide on Medical Web Development and Design

The crowded and unorganized website tends to distract clients. Users want to find necessary information quickly, so the website should be user-friendly and straightforward. Trends move fast nowadays, and it can be complicated to follow all of them. There are the latest innovations in medical practice website design for 2023.

User-centric design

The user-centered design considers the user's needs as much as possible in all phases of development. This means that the design process is influenced and guided by user behavior, values, and expectations from start to finish. Each design solution is evaluated regarding its value to the user and how effectively it will help them achieve their goals.

Flat design

A flat design of the user interface means using minimalistic and concise elements. As a result, you get a laconic but contrasting design that allows focusing on website content. A flat design can reduce the website loading time since simple design elements exist.

Micro animation

As you can understand from the name, micro animations stand for small animated parts of the user interface. Micro animations assist in drawing users’ attention and improving website navigation. However, micro animations shouldn’t overload your website. They should complement software functionality.

Hamburger menu

Hamburger menu stands for a button placed in the top corner of a website interface. Pressing this button, the user gets access to the main menu or navigation bar. Hamburger menu buttons are actively used these days since they require less space. The busy navigation bar can distract users from the website content. Additionally, such menus work perfectly on mobile devices making websites more user-friendly.

Bright colors

Colorful solutions have become one of the biggest medicine website design trends of 2023. It’s trendy to choose vivid and deep colors. Additionally, you can select several corporate colors to represent your brand. For example, orange stands for optimism, while blue indicates trustworthiness. So, it’s better to consider palettes during medical practice website development.

Icon branding

Icons allow you to present your brand more effectively and make it more remarkable. Each icon must match others in the set and have references to the brand. Thus, you’ll be able to make the most out of this trend.

As you can see, users expect to see clean and bright websites with animation soon. There are a lot of medical website design companies that can develop a website design following all your requirements and business goals. By the way, at Cleveroad, we also provide UI/UX services. If you are curious, check our Dribbble account to study how we follow all the mentioned trends.

Starting medical web development, you need to consider the features you want to integrate. Usually, they are divided into two groups — basic and advanced. The first group consists of the functions that are vital for your website to work correctly. As for advanced features, they tend to bring some exciting functions assisting with user engagement.

Let's start by examining the essential features of medical website development.

Contact & location information

Considering the medical website development, it should be easy for users to find the hospital location or phone number. Additionally, if you have various locations, make sure to provide the opportunity to select the nearest one. As for phone numbers, it’s better to place them on the homepage. For instance, you can integrate a click-to-call button. It allows calling from the website if the user looks through the website on mobile devices.

Key services

Make sure that it’s easy for clients to find out about the services offered by your hospital. If you provide some unique services, your UI/UX designers should think of how to emphasize them. For instance, medical website developers can add a list of services with an opportunity to click and look through more detailed information.

Team

Patients want to know more about the doctor, so it’s good to provide the data about the specialists. It’s possible to add data about the doctor’s education, experience, and more. As a result, you can gain patients’ trust and loyalty.

Appointments

Scheduling should be as easy as possible. It’s necessary to provide users with opportunities to choose the date, time, and doctor. Patients should fill in the request form with information like name, insurance, phone number, symptoms, and more.

Search

Entering the website, clients want to find the necessary information and learn more about your services. So, the primary task of medical website design and development is creating a user-friendly search. Additionally, it’s good to integrate filters and let users sort the search results with various criteria.

In addition to the basic medical website development, you can implement several advanced features that help improve the user experience.

Chatbots

Chatbots can be very useful for your business. For instance, they can find answers to the most frequently asked questions about the hospital working hours, location, and so on. All these will reduce the burden of your administrators, call centers, or whatever means you're using to answer clients' questions.

Call-to-action button

There can be popups that offer to schedule an appointment, find an appropriate doctor, etc. So, users can follow this link without searching for the required button in the navigation bar.

Online payments

After booking an appointment, the patients need to have an opportunity to pay for the service. Additionally, it’s better to implement several payment methods (e.g. PayPal, Visa) during medical website development. However, while payment integration, you need to consider security issues.

Online consultations

You can provide patients with the ability to consult a physician online. This function is useful for new clients and constant patients.

Feedback

The clients appreciate an opportunity to share their visit experience by leaving a testimonial. Positive comments assist in gaining visitors’ trust and bringing new clients to your hospital.

So, we’ve discussed the primary features that can be integrated during medical website development. It’s common to consider basic features as MVP ones since they are required to satisfy patients’ demands. We offer to develop an MVP version of the website and launch it. After that, according to the users’ feedback, medical website designers and developers can implement more complicated features.

To succeed, you must choose an appropriate tech stack during medical website design and development. Additionally, it’s better to ensure that you follow such regulations as HIPAA or HITECH that protect the patient's health information. These rules are also used to build EHR systems and other medical software.

Let’s discuss these guidelines more precisely.

In the case of any medical software, particularly medical web development, compliance with regulations is crucial. However, there is no single regulation for all solutions. Depending on the location and other circumstances, your medical website will have to meet a number of requirements and laws, such as HIPAA and HITECH for the USA, PIPEDA for Canada, or GDPR for European countries. Therefore, before creating your own medical product, it is very important to check out the government regulations.

To ensure medical website is compliant with industry-regulations and standards, it's better to cooperate with experienced medical web developers with practical expertise in creating telehealth solutions.

For example, the Cleveroad team had experience creating a medical software solution (compliant with HIPAA) for our US partner. We delivered a Clinic Management Platform with EMR and mobile application for rehab services providers using AWS cloud hosting. Our team met all the requirements for HIPAA and built a solution that ensure secure data exchange and storage. As a result our client got a robust, fault-tolerant, and secure platform that meets the best healthcare practices, orders the workflow, and optimizes schedule management without legal risks.

Medical website development involves dealing with sensitive data, so privacy policy deserves special attention. Work with an experienced software vendor who can implement security measures that is accessible and understandable to all users. It should include what data you collect, how you process and encrypt it, and how you protect it.

During medical website development, you must also use HTTPS and SSL certificates. They provide a secure connection to the server, as well as encryption of all data transmitted. The cost of certificates can vary depending on the type of protection and the number of domains. Your software provider will advise you on the option that suits your needs.

Medical website design and development requires a special approach. Your site should be intuitive so the user can easily navigate and understand how to access the necessary information. The experienced UI/UX team will create an optimal customer-centric design for you.

It's critical that your medical website looks good on any device, as many users prefer to use mobile gadgets. Therefore, web developers must ensure that your website functions and looks the same quality on any device.

A professional healthcare software development company will help you to take all the necessary preparatory steps and create a medical website considering all the features of the industry so that it will be the most profitable for you.

Medical website design and development usually take several subsequent steps to ensure the most efficient product creation. Let's consider them in detail.

First, you need to choose a company with relevant expertise and leave an application on the vendor's website describing the project's main idea. Then, within 24 hours, a Delivery Manager will contact you to arrange a consultation and a meeting with the team. You may also request to sign an NDA to keep your app concept confidential.

Next comes a meeting with the medical web development team. During this stage, the team of experts defines your key business goals, work scope, main constraints and concerns, and basic quality attributes. The Solution Design team comprises a business analyst, a solution architect, and a designer.

At this stage software experts turn all the previously agreed-upon requirements into a medical website development plan. The team does the following steps:

• Determines all the regulatory requirements depending on the region
• Creates detailed feature list
• Analyzes business processes and creates all required documentation
• Conducts a quality attributes workshop
• Prepares an exact cost estimate for the project, etc.

Appealing to Discovery services will allow you to speed up the medical website design and development process and make it more efficient.

A team of UI/UX designers actively works on the design concept to make it intuitive and provide the best user experience. Design team creates a prototype of the future medical website screen by screen, considering all minor details. After your approval, the design is sent to development.

Frontend and backend developers work on the project, ensuring the site functions correctly and quickly, applying the appropriate technological stack.

The front represents all the visible elements of the site that the user interacts with. Developers use the JavaScript and TypeScript programming languages and the Angular and React frameworks.

The web backend is the server side, which provides all the operations and data transfer. The languages used for this part are Ruby, Elixir, Python, PHP, Java, etc. Also, developers use Ruby On Rails and Phoenix frameworks and integrate cloud server platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Moreover, developers can use APIs to integrate with third-party services and make a medical website more functional. For example, you can integrate payment solutions like Braintree or Stripe to accept online payments via website. Or the Human API, Box API, or Cloud Healthcare API for secure data exchange and management.

Quality assurance necessarily accompanies each stage of development to ensure smooth and error-free operation of all features. Also, on completion of the web development, QA engineers conduct regression testing, including complete assurance of all functionality and stress testing.

When all the work on the medical website design and development is completed, it can be launched. On the release day, the team moves it to the live server and provides you with all the materials on the project, including links, specifications, design details, etc. However, your cooperation with the software provider doesn't end here. You can update the website, add new features, and fix potential bugs based on your customers' feedback.

There are two possible ways of cooperation with medical website developers — in-house or outsourcing. Of course, each option has pros and cons. For instance, in-house software builders tend to have higher hourly rates than outsourcing specialists. Today, more and more companies choose outsourced medical web development due to a large number of advantages. Let’s explore some tips to help you choose the best software provider.

One of the critical factors in choosing outsourced medical web developers is their location. For example, you can select a vendor from neighboring countries with a time zone difference of 1-2 hours (nearshoring) or from more remote areas (offshoring). The cost of software development, depending on the region and the number of talented specialists, also plays an important role. The hourly rates of developers in the most popular outsourcing areas are presented in the table below.

It is worth learning the customers' reviews to avoid making a mistake in choosing a medical web developer. You can use platforms like Clutch and GoodFirms, which provide comprehensive information about most IT companies.

To make sure that the software provider you choose will provide quality medical website design and development services, you should research the following:

• Website and blog to know more about the company
• Scope of offered IT services
• Portfolio and previous healthcare projects
• Relevant expertise and experience

When working with outsourced software vendors, ensuring the company knows how to address communication issues is critical. For example, many outsourcing companies use various communication and management tools like Slack, E-mails, Jira, Trello, and more. Find out how your collaboration will occur, arrange a joint schedule, etc. It is also vital that medical web developers are fluent in English so that communication is as accessible as possible.

Cleveroad is a software service provider headquartered in Estonia with over 10 years of experience. Our team creates web solutions that digitize workflows, modernize legacy software and improve user experience. Our specialists use the best technologies to develop solutions that fit business goals and regulatory requirements, ensuring smooth, error-free operation and secure data storage and transfer.

The Cleveroad team has extensive experience in building websites and applications for the healthcare industry. And we would like to tell you about our featured projects.

One such project is the mental health app Nedley Scorecard. The application was created for patients who suffer from depression. Users can track their mood and psychological condition and improve it with various activities. The main challenge during Nedley Scorecard development is implementing the Big Data algorithms. These algorithms can offer the right activities by analyzing the user’s personal information.

Another example of medical web development is a web-based Quality Management System (QMS) for medical device manufacturers. Our team has created from scratch a flexible QMS within the B2B SaaS business model compatible with FDA 21 CFR 820 and 21 CFR 11 and the ISO 13485 requirements. The system was successfully integrated into the company's services, allowing for business scaling and increasing revenue indicators and customer satisfaction rates.

Our team also delivered a telemedicine management system for our client, taking into account the requirements of GDPR and UK healthcare regulators such as CQC and MHRA. We built a SaaS platform allowing 24/7 online access to general practitioners and clinicians, video and audio consultations, and easy appointment booking. As a result, the customer has a complete platform that fits their business model and allows the customer to receive income from a telemedicine source.