6 Stakeholders Shaping the Healthcare App Market
Pharmaceutical marketing presents unique challenges due to its strict regulations, but more and more companies are investing in digitalization. And within this market, apps play a crucial role.
The health sector is one of the sectors with the most opportunities to influence our day-to-day lives; After all, as our grandmothers say, “health is the most important thing.”
One of the most interesting things that marketing in the pharmaceutical sector can contribute is tools that empower users to take care of their health by monitoring key indicators, treatments, and factors such as diet or physical activity.
The app format is particularly suitable for this monitoring, which explains the “boom” in recent years around mobile health or “mhealth”.
Within the health app market, there are different actors with diverse interests and goals.
Understanding them is essential to being able to carry out strategies for the development and promotion of health apps.
Therefore, in this article, you will be able to learn about the 6 stakeholders that will shape the app market in the healthcare sector.
All data comes from the mHealth App Developer Economics 2014 study.
1) Healthcare
This category includes pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, insurance, and medical technology companies.
Despite the importance of their protagonists, they only represent 3.4% of companies that develop mobile health applications.
In general, these are large companies with more than 5000 employees.
The main objective of this stakeholder is to create notoriety around your brand, product, or pathology.
Despite the small number of developers, they have published the most mHealth apps to date, but the average number of downloads is low compared to their competitors.
They are also the least satisfied with achieving their goals in the healthcare application market.
2) Application Experts
This category is mainly made up of small companies, with between 3 and 10 workers, dedicated to the creation of mobile applications.
They make up 14% of the players in this market.
The main objective of application experts is to take advantage of the great potential of this sector by employing their knowledge of mobile design and development. They have a relatively low number of medical experts, but they know everything about the world of apps.
3) Solidarity
As in the previous case, this category is mainly made up of companies with between 3 and 10 employees.
It accounts for almost a third of the market (32%).
This type of company is not focused on revenue generation, which is only a minor factor; Their primary motivation is to help others.
They usually consider that they have reached or even exceeded their goals, even if the total number of downloads achieved is modest.
This stakeholder has the highest percentage of participation in the segment of “companies with less than 5000 downloads last year” (61%).
4) Medical experts
Medical experts account for 20% of the healthcare application market. Their main characteristic is that they put their knowledge of medicine at the service of application development.
As in the case of the supporters, a large percentage of medical experts are motivated by the fact of helping others.
However, in their case, they combine this motivation with profitability: this stakeholder has the highest percentage of participation in the segment “companies that generated more than a million dollars in revenue with their health applications last year”.
5) Fitness experts
This category is mainly made up of companies with between 11 and 100 employees and represents around 10% of this community.
Fitness experts develop apps based on good health habits, often connected to sensors and databases in the healthcare industry, which utilize higher-than-average development tools.
Its central objective is to generate revenue.
6) Connectors
Finally, the “connectors” category accounts for 18% of the mobile health app developer market.
Its strategy is based on creating applications that generate value by connecting with other applications, with sensors, and with databases.
This group has the highest median income and is also the most satisfied with meeting their goals.
