Healthcare Apps for Post-COVID Era: Trends, Challenges and Potential Opportunities

The use of healthcare apps, e-health or m-health, has grown exponentially during the pandemic time. These apps can be used by people at home, work or on-the-go, which can help with a range of health, wellness and wellbeing tasks seamlessly, integrated with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of hospital(s) to capture patient information. The data can be accessed by clinicians, patients and attenders anytime and anywhere. One of the major advantages of the healthcare apps has been the reduction of time taken to visit a doctor/clinic/hospital (especially considering the waiting times), medical bills and expenses. To a greater extent, there are many healthcare apps that have improved the accuracy of diagnosis and significantly improved quality of treatment. However, in this paper we have identified 10 challenges and 10 opportunities that can help researchers, developers, policymakers and other stakeholders introspect while building and releasing robust healthcare apps that are very much needed in the post-covid era.