In-house developers for the parts of a virtual visit: video over WebRTC, booking across time zones, reminders and the audit trail. You interview the developer before signing, work starts within 24 hours of signing, and we sign a BAA whenever our team will handle patient data.
To hire telehealth app developers through Digital Heroes, tell us what happens in the visit your app runs and where it must work. You then interview the developer we put forward, and once you sign, they begin within 24 hours, which is the next working day. Every developer is our own employee, your repositories hold the code, and we sign a business associate agreement (BAA) whenever our team will touch patient data.
A telehealth developer is an app developer who also knows where patient data travels. The visit itself rides on WebRTC, the standard browsers and phones use for live audio and video, nearly always through a vendor's toolkit rather than code written from scratch. Around it sit booking, intake, reminders and staff screens, and under all of it sit the sign-in rules and the audit trail that HIPAA expects.
That mix is why hiring for telehealth is not hiring for a shopping app. The developer has to make a call connect on a hospital guest network, keep patient names out of crash reports and pick cloud services the provider's BAA covers. The table sets out each layer, what the work involves there and the tools a developer is likely to use.
| Layer | What the developer handles | Typical tools |
|---|---|---|
| Video and audio | Joining a call, the waiting room, reconnecting, and relays for networks that block direct connections | WebRTC through Twilio Video, Vonage Video API, Amazon Chime SDK or Daily |
| Patient and clinician apps | Two sets of screens with different jobs, on the phones and browsers patients really use | React Native or Flutter for both stores; Swift and Kotlin for native work; React or Angular on the web |
| API and records | Bookings, intake answers, visit records, roles and the audit log | Node.js, Python or Laravel; PostgreSQL with row-level security |
| Reminders and messages | Texts and emails that give the visit time and the join link and leave out anything clinical | A text and email provider that signs a BAA, with US carrier registration for texts |
| Cloud hosting | Patient data kept on services the cloud provider lists as HIPAA eligible, covered by the provider's BAA | AWS, Azure or Google Cloud |
This page is about the people. If you are buying the whole product instead, with its features, the telehealth rules it must follow and the cost of a build, read our telemedicine app development page.
Every developer offered here is employed by Digital Heroes and already works in one of our stacks. Mobile work covers Flutter, React Native, Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android. Web work covers Laravel and PHP, Angular and Node.js, and the team includes Python developers too. None of them is sourced from a marketplace once a contract exists.
This page names no individual developer. You meet the person proposed for your project in an interview, before anything is signed, and a poor fit is something to raise right there. The interview is yours to run, and section 06 has seven questions written for telehealth work.
One gap, stated plainly: we have not published a telehealth client build. Section 08 lists the client work we can name and the parts of it a telehealth app reuses. Ask every candidate, ours included, to show you a live video call they have shipped, and weigh the answer.
How you engage decides who answers for the result. With one developer inside your team, your product lead directs the work and reviews it. With a pod or a project team, delivery sits with us. Choose by the engineering leadership you already have, and only then by the monthly figure.
| How you engage | What arrives | Who directs | Start | Telehealth case it suits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One developer inside your team | An in-house developer working in your repository, standups and tools, billed by the month | Your product lead | Within 24 hours of signing | Adding video visits or a waiting room to an app you already run |
| A telehealth pod | A small team, a lead with developers and QA, responsible for one part of your product and billed by the month, usually for three months or longer | Our lead, working to your roadmap | Later than one developer, since a team has to be assembled | A virtual care startup with a roadmap and no engineering lead yet |
| A project team for a fixed scope | Discovery first, two weeks and paid separately, then a fixed price for the written scope | Our team, measured against the document | Discovery, then the build | A first version you can describe in a document |
After discovery, expect 8 to 12 weeks for an MVP and 16 to 28 for a production platform. Our custom software ranges are $40,000 to $150,000 for a focused first version, and $250,000 to $500,000 or more for complex enterprise platforms. Discovery may also conclude that an existing product would serve you better, and then that is what we tell you, with the written requirements yours to keep.
The pod model has its own page, hire a dedicated development team, and mobile hires outside healthcare are covered on hire mobile app developers.
A host with a signed BAA is where compliance starts, not where it ends. The cloud provider's agreement covers its infrastructure. What your app logs, who can open a record and whether you can later prove who did are all decided in code the developer writes. Five duties come up on every telehealth build, and each one belongs in the statement of work.
Our side of it does not vary. Whenever our team will handle protected health information, we sign a BAA with you first. Our healthcare builds are hosted on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, each covered by the provider's own BAA. Our HIPAA practices have also been reviewed by an outside firm rather than by ourselves.
The video is the part people worry about most, and the standard already protects it in transit. The IETF's security architecture for WebRTC, RFC 8827, requires every media channel to be secured with SRTP and forbids null encryption. The open questions are where else audio and video go: recordings, transcripts and the vendor's own servers.
| Toolkit | What the vendor's page says | What the developer checks |
|---|---|---|
| Twilio Video | Twilio's HIPAA Eligible Services document, dated 30 June 2026, includes Programmable Video with its recordings and its Network Traversal Service. Twilio's HIPAA page asks for its Security or Enterprise Edition before it signs a BAA | That every feature the app calls, the relay included, is on the list |
| Vonage Video API | Its HIPAA compliance page offers Video, Voice, Messages and Verify under a signed BAA, and says BAA coverage applies to US traffic only | Whether any patient, clinician or server could sit outside the US |
| Amazon Chime SDK | Named in AWS's HIPAA Eligible Services Reference, in the version dated 15 October 2026 | That the AWS account it runs in has the AWS BAA accepted before any patient joins |
| Daily | Its telehealth page offers a HIPAA package that includes a signed BAA | Which plan carries the package, and whether recording and transcription fall inside it |
None of these is our pick over the others. Choose by your hosting and by what each vendor's BAA covers, then name the choice in the statement of work so it never rests on a call.
Work begins the next working day, within 24 hours of the signature. In telehealth, week one is rarely slowed by code; it is slowed by access that waits on paperwork. Before signing, line up four things: the BAA with us if the developer will see patient data, a staging environment under your cloud provider's BAA, a sandbox account with your video vendor, and a set of made-up test patients.
A single developer needs someone on your side who reads their pull requests. Without that person, the pod is the safer route, because review and testing then sit with our lead and our QA team. To turn your own hours and team size into weeks, try the free software project timeline calculator.
Run these with the developer who would join your project. Someone who has shipped live video or handled patient data answers each one from memory; someone who has not reaches for general principles. Put the same seven to everyone on your shortlist, ours included, and note the answers side by side.
None of these needs a whiteboard. A candidate who stalls on three or more may still be a good app developer who has not worked on telehealth yet: a fine hire for the booking screens, and a risky one for the video.
There is no Digital Heroes rate card. We price one developer by the month after a call, when we know the stack and how many hours you need. No public source tracks telehealth developers on their own either, so the bands below cover software and app developers in general. Use them to test any quote, ours included.
| Source | Figure | What it describes |
|---|---|---|
| US Bureau of Labor Statistics | $135,980 median annual wage, May 2025 | Software developers employed in the US, before benefits |
| GoodFirms 2026 survey | 56.3 percent of surveyed firms quote $20 to $50 an hour | Regions named: Eastern Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa |
| GoodFirms 2026 survey | 10.9 percent quote $100 to $250 an hour | The US, Canada and Western Europe, for work that needs high security and domain expertise |
| GoodFirms 2026 survey | Above $250 an hour, quoted by 7.8 percent | US hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York City and Boston, Switzerland and the Nordics, and boutique firms anywhere |
| Upwork | $18 to $39 an hour | Its median for mobile app developers on the marketplace, drawn from past contracts |
Multiply by roughly 160 hours for a month of full-time work: the $20 to $50 band gives $3,200 to $8,000, and the $100 to $250 band gives $16,000 to $40,000. Spread over 2,080 working hours, the BLS median is about $65 an hour in salary alone, before payroll taxes, benefits and the cost of recruiting.
Telehealth adds costs that sit outside any developer's rate. Some video vendors sign a BAA only on a higher plan; Twilio, for one, asks for its Security or Enterprise Edition. Reminder texts need the carrier registration described above, and every visit adds video minutes and message fees. Ask for those modelled at the visit volume you expect, rather than quoted as unit prices.
Two free tools help with your own numbers. The development team cost calculator builds a monthly team cost with QA, design and project management included, and the in-house vs agency cost calculator compares hiring an employee with paying a firm over the same hours.
No telehealth client build of ours is published yet, so this section opens with that. What we can name are builds that contain the parts a telehealth app is made of. Each one is shown because the client allowed it, and none carries a results figure, since we have none we may publish.
AirTrainr's athlete and trainer mobile apps were built by our team on React Native, Expo and Supabase: search, booking, offers, chat and notifications between two kinds of user. Put a patient and a clinician in those two seats and the booking half of a telehealth app has the same structure.
Our team built the entire platform plus its public website. In it, clinics and hospitals plan monthly rosters, route leave through three approval levels that flag two staff of one speciality off together, assign tasks, track attendance at training, get reminders before certifications lapse, show who is on duty on screens and keep an audit history. Six roles divide access. It is staff software, not a video product.
SpeedyPrint, a web-to-print store in South Africa, runs on code we wrote in Next.js 15, React, TypeScript and Supabase: PayFast checkout driven by payment webhooks, transactional email, a status history on every order, and an admin panel split into three roles. Charging for a visit and limiting staff by role draw on the same parts.
The live chat assistant on this site and the AI copilot in our CRM were both built in-house. Real-time messages between a visitor and our team are something we operate every day, not only something we build for clients.
For the wider healthcare picture, including patient portals, wellness apps and where our scope stops, read our healthcare software development overview and its list of HIPAA safeguards.
You own what the developer writes. Our MSA assigns you the code, designs and assets created for your project once it is paid in full; we keep libraries and tooling that predate it or were built for general reuse. Your company holds, and pays for, the repositories and cloud accounts, and our developer is a collaborator on them whom you can remove.
Do the same with the video vendor account and the text provider account. Whoever owns those accounts owns the BAA with that vendor and the call history, so they belong to your company from the first day, never to the developer or to us.
The contracting company is whichever one your MSA names: in India, Digital Heroes Technologies Pvt Ltd, and in the US, Digital Heroesco LLC. New York law usually governs US engagements. Booking a scoping call triggers a one-page mutual NDA, and the BAA comes before any patient data moves.
Engineering happens in Delhi and Lucknow, on a schedule that overlaps the New York working day, with some mobile engineers in Sydney. The New York office works 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern on weekdays and answers within that same day. Put the hours the developer shares with your clinicians' day into the statement of work; the free time zone planner shows them for your city.
Four situations in which the first call ends with us recommending someone else, because placing a developer would not solve your problem.
Anything else, from a single Kotlin developer joining an Android app you already run to a full pod for version one, begins with a free 30-minute call.
Each outside figure and rule on this page traces to one of the documents below. All were read on 17 October 2026, and every link points at the publisher's own copy.
Start with the people: someone who owns the product and the clinical workflow, then developers for the video, the apps and the backend. One experienced developer can build a narrow first version on a vendor's video toolkit; a pod with QA suits a launch on web, iOS and Android at once. Settle the video vendor and its BAA in the first week, keep test data made up, and release to a few clinicians before any patient.
An employed US software developer earns a median $135,980 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Firms quote by the hour: 56.3 percent of those in GoodFirms' 2026 survey charge $20 to $50, mostly outside North America and Western Europe, while Upwork's median for mobile app developers is $18 to $39. For a whole product built by us, plan on $40,000 to $150,000 for a focused first version.
Usually, yes, and it is a common way in. Before proposing changes, the developer gets the existing code running on staging, then reports in writing on its state: which parts hold up, which are missing, and where patient data reaches a service without a BAA. Whether to keep building on it or replace parts is then your decision, made with that report in hand.
Live video over WebRTC through a vendor toolkit, including relays for networks that block direct calls; booking that handles time zones and the states each clinician is licensed in; reminders that reveal nothing clinical; and HIPAA safeguards in code, such as unique sign-ins, automatic logoff and an audit trail. On phones, add native call handling, such as CallKit on iOS. Ask for a shipped example of each.
Ours begin the working day after you sign, inside 24 hours. Expect that first day to go on access, so have the repository, a staging environment under your cloud provider's BAA and a video vendor sandbox ready beforehand. Assembling a pod takes longer than placing one person, and a fixed-scope project spends its first two weeks on discovery before any code is written.
The company that employs them does. A firm whose team creates, receives, keeps or sends protected health information for you is a business associate, and so is any subcontractor doing the same for it. Our BAA with you is signed before anyone on our team touches patient data, and your video, hosting and text vendors each sign their own.
For a narrow first version on a vendor's video toolkit, often yes, as long as someone on your side owns the product and reviews the code. Once the product needs web, iOS and Android, a clinician view, admin tools and release testing all at the same time, one person becomes the bottleneck, and a pod with a lead and QA is the safer model.
Your company does, once the work is paid for: our MSA assigns everything created for your project to you, and we retain tooling that predates it or was built for reuse. Open the repositories, the cloud account and the video vendor account under your company's name from the start, so the developer is a guest on each one, removable at any time, and never its owner.
Last reviewed .
Tell us what happens in the visit your app runs, which platforms it needs and whether patient data is already flowing. After a free 30-minute call, you interview the developer we suggest. Sign, and they begin the next working day. The call itself commits you to nothing.
115 people across five studios in New York, Delhi, London, Sydney and Lucknow, shipping ecommerce, web, software and mobile work for founder-led brands. Senior engineers only, no account-manager relay, and the same team from kickoff to launch.
Chief Technology Officer · Lucknow · 50 posts on the site
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