Let us give you a number. There are around 80000 brick-and-mortar pharmacies in the USA. But only around 800 pharmacies or pharmacists dared to launch online pharmacies through websites, web apps, or mobile apps.

Meaning, only 1% of total American pharmacies dared to adopt technology on a mass level; the best thing is, you are one of them.

New York is home to some of the big health tech brands. In fact, a unicorn online pharmacy named Capsule was also founded in New York.

Because of its very diverse population, high per capita income, high smartphone adoption, and high literacy rate, New York-founded health tech startups are more likely to acquire more customers and hire talented resources with ease.

Most importantly, New Yorkers have been habituated to ordering essential items online due to the presence of all sorts of on-demand delivery startups. Thus, New York is the business terrain where all on-demand startups are focused on!

Well, this is the tricky part and the majority of healthcare entrepreneurs fail here.

They either lack the budget for adopting technology or have the wrong impression of the capital cost required to build technology infrastructure for their healthcare startups.

What makes their situation worse is that they never have a plan ready for claiming high ROI after investing in technology. Because they believe in running things on autopilot after adopting technology.

But we have solid surety that you have worked on the budget part too.

Everyone knows about competitive analysis. But when it comes to the best way to do competitive analysis, people lock their lips.

So, let us tell you the best way. Be the customer of your competitors. Experience their online pharmacy services by yourself. And identify where they win the customers and where they lose.

That’s how you outsmart them!

Knowing what cooks behind the doors of your competitors is a breakthrough! And it is not difficult to sense their next 5 moves.

You can easily sense their next 5 moves by connecting the dots between market trends, their current focus, their recent technology adoption, new rolled-out features, new hiring, and most importantly changes in the business model.

Being an owner of a mail-order pharmacy in New York, you will have multiple ways to make money. But you must consider only those ways which deliver value to both you and your customers. You must make a deal that works for every stakeholder, including you.

And by preparing a business model separately for each user group such as parents, students, and seniors, you can seamlessly understand their user persona & their expectations, resulting in delivering equal value to every single customer landing on your app or website.

The most lethal mistake in the startup ecosystem is a high dependency on a single revenue stream. Divide your revenue streams into primary and secondary revenue streams and find different ways to keep adding new revenue streams. You must have a roadmap ready for this.

Features influence the app development cost and user experience the most. Thus, be specific. Categorize the features into 3 major categories – common features, advanced features, and good-to-have features.

Common features are those features that need to be in the app at any cost. Whereas, you can skip some of the advanced features and skip all of the good-to-have features if you are falling short of budget.

Building a cross-platform mobile app requires less development time, leading to development cost savings. Because a cross-platform app runs both on Android and iOS devices with a single codebase.

However, it cannot beat the performance delivered by native apps. Thus, opt-in for cross-platform if you have a tight budget. Otherwise, go for native apps. It is truly rewarding!

For your temporary benefits, don’t put your future at risk. You must select a tech stack in such a way that it can support an increase in the number of users in the future. Otherwise, you will need to invest in scaling up your IT infrastructure more than you can achieve affordability now.

This is a bit technical but very crucial. Historically, monolithic architecture was used to deploy applications. However, in monolithic architecture, every service or feature of the application is interconnected. Meaning, if one service goes down, the entire application goes down.

But in a microservice architecture, the application is hosted in many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components or services which facilitate faster development time and fewer maintenance efforts.

We have observed that both IT companies and entrepreneurs are giving the cold shoulder to mobile app QA testing. But it is essential in 2023 to dominate the market. A small glitch in the app can kill the entire customer experience and brand reputation.

Thus, emphasize QA testing and carry out load testing, integration testing, performance testing, UI/UX testing, and most importantly security testing.

Why? Because IT companies entertaining all industries severely lack healthcare-specific knowledge. They don’t have healthcare vision and passion. Their developers don’t have prior experience in dealing with HL7 and other healthcare interoperability standards. And most importantly, they don’t understand the gravity of HIPAA and the pain of patients and providers!

Navigating between evolving and complex regulatory requirements can be tedious. This includes maintaining and obtaining appropriate licenses, ensuring compliance with dispensing and prescription requirements, and keeping up with the changing data protection laws.

Non-compliance with these requirements can often result in financial and legal consequences which include penalties, fines, and shutdown of operations.

Ensuring the authenticity and safety of online sold medications can be challenging. Online pharmacies may face some issues related to it like expired or improperly stored medications, counterfeit medications, or falsified drugs. This can pose significant risks to patient health and safety, and may result in legal liabilities for the mail-order pharmacy or online pharmacy.

For the verification of validity and authority of online prescriptions, online pharmacies should have robust processes like

• Verifying credentials of prescribing healthcare professionals
• Validating the prescription through telemedicine consultations
• Ensuring prescription compliance with regulatory requirements

Managing these processes can be time-consuming and may require significant resources.

Online pharmacies can protect customer data by securing online transactions, protecting against data breaches, and complying with data protection laws.

Ensuring the security and privacy of customer information can be challenging due to the constantly evolving nature of cybersecurity threats.

Maintaining a positive reputation in the online pharmacy marketplace is crucial for success. Feedback and reputation can spread quickly in the online market environment where you’ll be required to manage customer reviews, handle complaints, and maintain good customer service. Ensuring customer satisfaction and managing an online reputation require ongoing effort and attention.