10 Telemedicine Business Ideas for Successful Startup

One of the biggest changes that the healthcare industry has experienced in the last three years was moving to digital. As in-person visits were put on pause during the pandemic, healthcare professionals started to look for ways of delivering medical care remotely.

Plus, patients themselves have become more tech-savvy which has made the introduction of the new technologies and digital products easier for both parties.

In view of that, the telehealth market has become quite lucrative and welcoming for startups offering new telemedicine app ideas and products. To understand how a company can succeed in this niche, let's check the list of profitable telehealth business ideas that today point the direction for further development of the e-health industry.

10 Telehealth Business Ideas to Keep an Eye On in 2022 and Beyond

1. Hospital-at-home service

The goal of such solutions is to make it possible for a patient to get proper hospital care — or at a level that can be considered sufficient — without leaving their homes. These platforms and medical devices would be especially helpful for elderly people or disabled individuals for whom there's no way to get to the hospital in a timely manner.

The hospital-at-home solutions can integrate with wearables to get a comprehensive picture of a patient's state and allow for faster reactions during critical situations. Aside from the remote at-home monitoring, such solutions can also integrate with IoMT devices in hospitals to increase efficiency across different departments — in surgical units for example to monitor a patient's state of recovery.

2. Interactive telehealth

As the name suggests, these solutions are used to facilitate interaction between the doctor and the patient. It includes live consultations via camera or text chat. You can think of it as a 'Zoom for healthcare' type of product; however, what makes interactive health apps different from other solutions is that the former focus on providing additional functionalities (for both doctors and patients) that would allow for carrying out medical consultation in the most effective way possible.

For example, when integrated with a hospital management system, the interactive health app can automatically provide a doctor with medical records of a patient once they join the live chat or feature a digital queue that will organize the consultation process. For patients, the features may include an integrated payment gateway or the ability to get an electronic prescription without leaving a live chat.

This type of telemedicine perfectly fits the non-urgent medical care niche, for example telepsychiatry, which puts it among the best business ideas for telehealth for 2023.

3. Patient portals

This is a platform that gives patients access to all their personal health information. Prescriptions, recent visits to the doctor, laboratory results, etc. — all this information is stored in the patient profile and gets updated automatically once the edits are made on the server side (hospital system).

Aside from providing vital health information, portals can also allow patients to message their doctor, make payments, schedule appointments, download educational materials, or request refills of their prescriptions.

4. Remote patient monitoring

Similar to the hospital-at-home service model, remote patient monitoring (RPM), however, implies delivering healthcare on a much wider scale. Its primary goal is not to focus on patients getting access to medical care from their home (even though it's still a vital part of the technology too), but patients receiving basic medical assistance no matter what their location or time of day is. In other words: on the go.

RPM doesn't substitute traditional medical care or in-person visits to the hospital, instead, it empowers patients with the necessary knowledge, allowing them to be 100% aware of what's going on with their health. This is why RPM solutions can find their application far beyond our houses: in offices, factories, schools, etc.

5. Medical billing

Among other small telehealth business ideas, this might be the best one as it perfectly fits small clinics and private medical practices. If we're talking about large hospitals, these normally have the in-house staff to deal with all documentation, so as a rule of thumb, they manage all billing processes by themselves — which is not the case for smaller medical facilities and practices. So, the medical billing service can greatly reduce the burden of paperwork for such organizations.

6. Childbirth services

Providing parents with the necessary instruments and services to help them control the childbirth process is also among the promising business ideas for telemedicine. Here, startups can go with the creation of a knowledge base for expectant parents or a telemedicine service that connects parents with midwives or doulas.

Midwives are trained healthcare assistants that support women during childbirth (in the US alone the popularity of midwifery services increases greatly year by year), while doulas are more of pregnancy coaches who prepare a couple to become parents.

7. Mental health products

Mental health apps are perfect for those who have mental issues and want to address them, but can't (or don't want to) do this in person. The area of application of such products is quite broad and includes stress, anxiety, and anger management; improvement of sleep and memory, thinking skills and relaxation. Mental health apps can also be used in cognitive behavioral therapy. To sum up, not only do these solutions help to cope with existing mental illness but also prevent users from falling into crisis.

8. Medical supply app

We all know that elderly people and patients with chronic conditions or disabilities have an ongoing need for different kinds of medical supplies or equipment. For obvious reasons going to a nearby physical store to get medicine or supplies for this audience would be tiresome or even impossible.

So this is where medical supply products can be helpful. Aside from the main buying/ordering functionality, these apps can also offer coupons and special discounts, and facilitate in-app payments. They can also integrate with hospital systems to supply patients with pharmaceutical products from the facility they know and trust.

9. Health information portals

The term 'health information portal' is akin to the term 'patient portal' described above, but these two should not be confused with one another. While patient portals are geared around a single patient, providing them with functionality tuned to their needs, health information portals focus on the health of the population.

Consider it as a knowledge base that provides access to data reports, guidelines, scientific articles, industry news, research programs, and other health-related projects. So, the audience of such portals is, in fact, not patients, but healthcare professionals seeking the latest news, industry updates, and knowledge in the field.

10. Hospital management software

A hospital management system (HMS) allows healthcare facilities to organize their internal processes and collect disparate processes all in one place. HMSs are used for managing all the paperwork, maintaining medical records of the patients, keeping track of appointment schedules, processing bill payments, etc.

With the help of such solutions, hospitals can improve operational efficiency, drastically reduce the amount of time doctors spend on mundane tasks, and improve the patient experience as a whole.

The wide functionality possibilities and high demand for these systems prove that the development of HMS might be among the best business ideas for telehealth.

Consider Lunka.tech Your Partner

Our team has years of experience developing digital products for the e-health industry. The expertise we offer varies from the creation of web platforms to the development of multicomponent apps and services. Some of the most recent projects that we’ve delivered are:

• Salus Optima — web platform that allows healthcare professionals to digitize their businesses.
• Bianu — a digital service for pregnant women that provides personalized recommendations regarding nutrition and supplements based on data input, all in accordance with their current pregnancy trimester.
• Match Fit Pass — innovative and one-of-a-kind mobile solution that combines features of a healthcare app and mobile ticketing service.

To discuss how you can benefit from our telehealth app development services, and bring your business ideas for telemedicine to life, reach out to us!

Final Thoughts

When talking about the development of telemedicine and top telemedicine business ideas, we cannot help but mention COVID-19 and the effect it caused on the industry. Covid apps that entered the market during the pandemic have shown that delivering medical (or mental) care at a distance can actually be done.

And even though these solutions cannot yet substitute in-person medical care, they hold huge potential and should be considered more like digital assistants for doctors and patients, rather than generic video tools or text messengers. So, if you want to tap into this market with some great telemedicine business ideas— now is the right time to do it.
These were the main ideas to start the new telehealth business that we've selected for this post. If you want more ideas for a telemedicine startup or are looking for a reliable software development partner, make sure to contact our team for a free consultation!

FAQ

Is telehealth a good business?

The telehealth market has been on the rise in recent years, growing at a CAGR of 26.6%. It means that there are a lot of opportunities for both large corporations and startups. The further the industry develops the higher demand would be for those products and services that will be able to adopt new technologies. So the answer would be 'yes': the telehealth market has the potential, and telehealth app ideas are worth considering

How to find telehealth business ideas?

The process is pretty straightforward. First, you need to identify and analyze existing apps in your niche. Look at their performance, features, etc. Study user feedback to understand what experience a particular product brings to them. You can also check what's trending in the App Store or Google Play in this category. Aside from that, we also recommend attending different hackathons and meetups to source telehealth entrepreneur ideas from there and learn which telemedicine products get funded or are in demand in the market.

What startups are working on telemedicine?

Here you can think of such companies as Ceiba Healthcare, an AI-based platform that allows streamlining patient data to improve the delivery of critical care, Think Biosolution, a telehealth platform for remote patient monitoring that also integrates with wearable devices, Lumed, a video platform that enables real-time interactions between doctors and patients, AssayMe, a self-diagnosis health platform for conducting at-home tests, and Doctolib, a digital platform that makes the work of healthcare personnel more efficient and improves access to healthcare services for patients

We have a telehealth app idea, what's next?

If you have a telehealth startup idea that you want to turn into reality, simply call, email, or contact us via a dedicated form on our website, and our managers will reach out to you within a business day to discuss your project and see how we can help!

This Article Was helpful?