How You Can Build an Online Healthcare and Wellness Services Marketplace
We know how to build an online Healthcare and Wellness services marketplace and make it convenient for your customers. Healthcare and Wellness services are very popular and profitable business. The industry turnovers are growing annually. And so, this market value increased from 129 to 142 billion euros between 2013 and 2018 in Western Europe; and at the same time, U.S. market value was approximately 167 billion dollars in 2017.
Various apps and extensions contributed to the industry development, and there's no way to build on successful healthcare and wellness business, including auction without making a website or mobile application.
What is a health insurance marketplace?
Also called Health Exchange, this is the online service where customers, who don't have healthcare insurance, may buy this insurance or find out some information about it. Everybody can choose an affordable insurance plan that will be cheaper than the same one insurants offer. It's similar to multi-vendor store, where patients compare and purchase the insurances they prefer.
Such an organization is the result of the adoption of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, that regulates U.S. medical insurance market. If your employer doesn't offer any health coverage you may buy it on the Health Exchange
What is the Obamacare's individual mandate?
The Obamacare act was designed to protect the most vulnerable population segments and to offset the imbalance at medical insurance market. Since adoption, even people who earn not much and those who have disabilities or chronic diseases can and must have a health coverage with a minimally acceptable list of medical services they can afford.
The individual mandate means that now is required to carry health coverage or pay a penalty for individuals whose health is not covered by one of the public insurance programs sponsored by an employer. This mandate effect is aimed at overcoming the situation in the health insurance market when people prefer to buy insurance, only already having health problems; that thereby increases the cost of insurance for all other insurers.
Such provision of Obamacare allows overcoming the imbalance in the cost of services in the health insurance marketplace and provides an affordable plan for medical services for everyone.
The individual mandate doesn't apply to people who prefer to pay penalty for not carrying coverage; single young people are mainly among them.
Marketplaces are supposed to make it easier to shop for coverage
The marketplace is the perfect solution to find a suitable insurance plan that meets needs and expenses of every U.S. citizen.
Who is the target audience and main objectives?
Marketplace is intended for those who do not have a plan yet but want to choose and purchase the affordable one, and for those who already have a plan and want to make any changes to it. This is online platform both for employers and employees, including self-employed people, who want to find a suitable insurance plan, compare and buy coverage or pay a penalty.
Opportunities that opens marketplace areas of health insurance, healthcare and wellness!
The Online Health Consultation Marketplace is the most suitable place where everyone can book, pay, and seek treatment with just a few clicks. Everybody can find an appropriate offer in any area:
- for social care
- medical care at home
- care of patients
- personal hygiene services
- massage services.
It is possible to find and chose services of various healthcare specialists:
- nutritionists
- physiotherapists
- personal trainers and many others
Marketplace enables to buy health insurance in the most convenient way.
Technology Stack
To make an online marketplace powerful, reliable and convenient a whole stack of advanced web technologies must be implemented.
Thus, what technologies should you choose for marketplace building? Every marketplace owner should select each of the main technology sections:
- Client-side programming (Front-end);
- Server-side (Back-end):
- Programming;
- Database;
- Sever.
Client Side
Firstly, the visual part of the website must be created, i.e. front-end section. The interface capabilities are the most important part of the application from the perspective of its usability. On this stage, you get the picture of how your future marketplace looks like. This is done by usage of HTML and CSS.
To make it animated we use JavaScript programming language, particularly Angular JS and React JS frameworks make it much faster than pure JavaScript Our single-page applications built with one of the popular and powerful JavaScript frameworks:
- Angular JS is frontend framework that compiles to JavaScript and is perfect for building any web-application for every business need.
- React JS enables to surf a site comfortably, not reloading a page during content changes.
An interaction must be comfortable and fast; therefore we use Ruby as the main programming language and CoffeeScript, the fruitful and functional programming language from JavaScript family.
Whatever technology you choose, your marketplace will be displayed perfectly both on the desktop and mobile devices. But it’s still a revived picture, without any necessary functions.
Server Side
After that, the marketplace gets an opportunity to work and serve your needs, that means it became interactive and can take orders, show information by customer's request, allows the possibility to use various integrated apps and systems (payment systems, e-commerce etc.). This is achieved by using PHP, Node JS, Python, Java, Scala or our favourite Ruby on Rails.
We guarantee a reliable and high-performance server side of our apps. We use modern and powerful languages:
- Node JS – for fast loading and functionality even for heavy websites;
- PHP – we use this programming language to expand already operating website and make it more convenient for customers;
- Python – a simple and fast programming language that helps effectively solve many non-trivial tasks;
- Java – today it is probably the most common language for web application development, particularly in e-commerce, it is universal and is supported by all devices;
- Scala – this language is very similar to Java, but it's more lightweight and simple, designed for quick and easy creation of web application components;
- Ruby on Rails – the programming language that is the ideal tool for quick development and high productivity.
Thirdly, you should choose the type of database – relational (for structured information) and non-relational. We use MySQL for small and medium websites, PostgreSQL for big data, and MongoDB or CouchDB for unstructured data.
All build structure and the data available for the website (both customers' and marketplace) must be stored somewhere. Thus, the final choice is a server. It can be cloud storage, and we have long-term and successful experience of using services of Amazon cloud. Or the traditional platform on Ubuntu, RehHat or CenrtOS.
If you are not versed in the functionality of each of the technologies nor have some doubts, then our business consultant will help you find an acceptable solution. We select an appropriate technology by several criterions:
- Size of marketplace. We use CMS to build simple and light-weight websites. To create middle and large web-applications and websites we need to develop it from scratch and therefore use a few technologies and web programming languages.
- Server pressure. We need to know the potential website traffic and a load on the server, in order to correctly calculate the power of the server and to minimize latency;
- Development costs. Knowing your planned budget and the demand for the power and complexity of the application, we will pick up an opportune solution. The time you have for launching the project, and the various programming languages developers' salaries are the most of all varies the price for the development of similar projects;
- Functionality of e-commerce. Number of e-commerce opportunities you want on the website expand the number of technologies we use to ensure it;
- Security. There's no universal technology to protect every website, but the right choice of exactly that programming language what your site needs to protect your marketplace the most;
- User rights. The more rights your users must have the more heavy technology we use.
This is quite responsible and hard effort to choose the technologies that meet all the project requirements, but we can help you to deal with that.
Integrations
Today website or application doesn't extend without various social network and payment system integration. It is an integral part of our marketplace development and launch.
Testing
We care about our customers and our product. That’s why our Software Testing Specialists provide numerous tests to make sure that your site or application operates perfectly. It includes unit, integration, functional, system, regression and smoke testing. As well as frontend tests of performance and load, UI/UX, security, and cross-browser displaying.
Promotion and launch
Our SEO and SMM specialists provide promotion and launch services that save your money and extend your business. We offer:
- Website auditing;
- Social media marketing;
- PPC-advertising;
- Link building
- Site optimization,
- Content Marketing.
How much will it cost to build an Online Healthcare and Wellness Services Marketplace?
The functionality of the future website affects the technologies that will be used during the development. The technology stack affects the marketplace price. We offer three integration packages:
- Basic – suitable solution for low-budget projects. It costs only $350 and includes all constituents of webproject:
- Opensource platform application (Opencart, Cocorico, Sharetribe),
- PayPal payment
- Google Maps and Facebook API
- Digital Ocean
- DNS configuration
- Free SSL certificate
- CentOS
2. Standard – includes social media integration. It costs $550 and has additional includes:
- Amazon AWS EC2 or OVH
- CentOS, Ubuntu or Debian
- Basic business analysis & technical requirements
- PayPal API in a sandbox mode
- Backup of the database
- SMS notifications about marketplace events
3. Custom – allows implementing of all your wishes and business needs for an appropriate price of $650. In addition to previous options it includes:
- Unique design
- Custom homepage
- Monitoring
- Arbitrary implementation
- SEO audit and optimization
