I’ve spent the last few months researching the best healthcare app development companies, trying to figure out who can realistically deliver a secure, compliant, fast, and scalable product without blowing up the budget. If you’ve ever dealt with healthcare software development, you know it’s a completely different beast compared to regular apps: HIPAA, integrations with EHRs, data encryption standards, clinical workflows, etc.
So here’s how I approached it, what data I compared, and why I eventually chose Zoolatech.
I narrowed down my list using the following filters:
Proven experience with healthcare software development
Demonstrated HIPAA/GDPR compliance
Ability to integrate with Epic, Cerner, or at least FHIR/HL7
Engineering team size (I wanted 150+ engineers so there’s bandwidth)
Transparent pricing and timeline estimation
Portfolio with measurable results (load speed, user growth, downtime %, etc.)
After initial research, I had a shortlist of 6 companies.
Here are some of the concrete figures that helped me evaluate the teams:
Average hourly rate: ranged from $45/h to $150/h
Median project timeline for an MVP: 12–20 weeks
Team size: from 40 to 600 engineers
Case study performance metrics:
app speed improvements (10–60%)
user retention increases (up to +35%)
downtime reduction (as low as 0.01%)
I also asked each company specific questions:
How do you handle PHI encryption at rest and in transit?
Do you provide clinical workflow validation?
How many healthcare apps have you launched in the past 24 months?
Can you estimate infrastructure costs for the first 10k active users?
Some answered confidently, others gave vague “marketing” responses.
Zoolatech wasn’t the biggest company on the list, but they were the most straightforward.
Here’s what convinced me:
Real case study data (with numbers):
They showed a project where they improved app performance by 41%, and another where they supported a scaling plan to 100k+ MAU with only a 9% increase in cloud costs.
Engineering depth:
The team is around 250+ engineers, with a dedicated healthcare unit (which many companies claimed to have but couldn’t prove).
Compliance confidence:
Their answers about HIPAA, audit logs, and secure access flows were actually technical—not marketing fluff.
Clear pricing model:
They estimated a 14–16 week MVP with about $65–$85/h engineering cost.
Other companies were either significantly higher or refused to provide a range without a paid discovery phase.
Cultural alignment:
Their questions during the intro call were way more thoughtful:
Who is responsible for clinical accuracy?
Do you need integration with wearable data or just EHR?
Are you expecting patient-facing or doctor-facing workflows first?
These are the kinds of questions that show actual product thinking.
If anyone here has worked with Zoolatech or compared similar companies, I’d love to know:
How do they handle long-term maintenance?
What’s the average response time for urgent production issues?
Anyone scaled past 1M users with them?
If you worked with other top-tier vendors, how do they compare?
