How to choose a healthcare app development company

Most shortlists look identical on paper

Search for a healthcare mobile app development company and you get a hundred firms claiming HIPAA compliance, FHIR fluency and award-winning design. The claims are cheap. The evidence is not.

Wve Labs has been building digital products since 2015, with mobile as our deepest area of expertise for more than a decade, for organizations including Sony, Honda, Guardian, Marriott and USC. Below is the diligence we would run if we were sitting on your side of the table.

Eight questions that separate the field

Ask these of every healthcare app development company on your list and compare the answers side by side. Vague answers are answers.

• Show me the PHI boundary in an architecture you shipped — which services see identifiers, and which never do?
• Which vendors in your stack sign a business associate agreement, and can I see the list?
• How do you handle release rules for lab results so nothing reaches a patient before a clinician signs it?
• What is your integration path into Epic, Cerner or athenahealth, and what happens when that interface is down?
• Who owns the code, the pipelines and the App Store listings at the end of the engagement?
• What did your last healthcare launch measure in month three, not week one?
• How do you evidence WCAG 2.2 AA, not just claim it?
• Which named engineers work on this, and are they employees?

Team shape beats headcount

A healthcare product needs product strategy, design and engineering answering to one plan. Firms that hand off between three separate vendors lose the clinical nuance in the gaps — and clinical nuance is the whole product.

Serious healthcare engagements at Wve Labs start around $25,000, which typically covers a scoped discovery and a working, testable slice of the real product rather than a slide deck.