Smartphone Medical "Apps" are Exploding

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Colleagues,

If like me, it seems to you that medical "Apps" for your iPhone, Android, ect. are growing rapidly, here is some data to back up your impression ...

As reported in V-Fluence ... i-Tunes' Health & Fitness or Medical categories now contain more than 6,000 apps for iPhones. As of January 2010, there were more than 1,700 medical applications; all together, they've been downloaded by more than 1 million users...

... Among these, there are hundreds of applications that reference virtually every major pharmaceutical brand name, offering services from basic prescribing data to "cost-saving" generic or over-the-counteralternative options. These have been developed by medical publishers, pharmacies, payers, hospitals, advocacy groups, alternative health promoters, health care professionals, litigators, government agencies and others. Virtually every therapeutic area is already represented with growing offerings for disease management...

... New mobile phone applications in areas like disease management, medication tracking, drug recalls, health cost and record management are being released daily. With the recent addition of Google to the smart phone market, you can bet that new Android platform health applications will start rolling out at a faster pace in 2010...

... According a study released by Manhattan Research, more than half of U.S. physicians reported that they owned a PDA or smart phone in 2008 ... According to Skyscape research, 80 percent of physicians say they are more likely to base a clinical decision on information they access via a Smartphone versus information they've read in a journal...

Examples of branded iPhone apps include:

Read on at: http://www.v-fluence.com/blog/459/healthcare-apps-exploding-in-mobi...

[Joseph Kvedar]

Conrad: i wonder how many of these burgeoning apps are for providers and how many for patients. of the ones for patients, i wonder what the evidence of traction is.

any insights?

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Joe,

As always, you raise a good and salient point. One for which I am not qualified to answer. Let's see if one of the members of the mHealth group with greater knowledge than I responds. Thanx for the question.

CC

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Joe,

Happened to run across this post from Brian Dolan, MobileHealthNews, from yesterday, 11 March 2009 ..

... During the six weeks leading up to HIMSS, the MobiHealthNews team scoured the close to 7,000 smartphone applications that are designated as health or medical related in application stores including iPhone’s AppStore, Google’s Android Market, BlackBerry’s App World, Palm’s App Catalog and Nokia’s Ovi Store...

... We discovered that less than 6,000 apps found within these stores are actually health, medical or fitness related. We then evaluated which of these apps were intended for use by consumers and patients and which were intended for use by healthcare professionals. Overall, there is about a 70-30 split for intended user: About 70 percent of all health-related smartphone apps are intended for use by consumers, while about 30 percent are intended for use by healthcare professionals...

Joe: This doesn't answer the question of traction, but does seem to address the provider/patient mix.

CC

Here is a link: http://mobihealthnews.com/6908/3-million-downloads-for-android-heal...

[Thomas GIannulli MD, MS]

The Iphone Medical App space does have a large number of medical provider directed apps, most of these apps are "point" apps that provide decision support or functionality related to a narrow topic, like medical calculators, drug reference etc. These are many and are often redundant, so the number of apps outweighs the magnitude of their utility the end user. There are also a small number (<12) integrated apps, that are designed to offer a suite of functionality that is focused on workflow, these are the EMR apps, and are typically alligned with a well know EMR vendor's larger offering. Even fewer of these apps are designed to be used immediately without a significant EMR systems purchase. So the 1000's of apps really boils down to a small number of use cases.

[CC-Conrad Clyburn-MedForeSight]

Dr Giannulli,

Thank you for your useful analysis. I take it that it is premature to be deeply impressed with the sheer number of mobile Apps that are currently proliferating in the market. Rather, what we should be really on the lookout for are integrated functionalities that fit seamlessly into the real world of clinical work-flows. I assume, that this is where the real potential utility for mobile Apps will prove its worth. These systems will also require significant clinical input to design and validate.

Do I have that right?

CC