With the estimated 1 billion people with smartphones and tablets, combined with the hunger for health information, it’s not surprising that app developers see a world of opportunity before them. But a new report by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics assessing the health app market calls into question how liberally the word health is applied to what’s essentially consumer entertainment.
In a rummage through the iTunes Store, IMS found that about half of the consumer-facing mobile apps on the market are wrongly categorized as health apps.
Of the 43,689 apps it studied from the app store, about 20,000 were either not health apps at all or only loosely affiliated with health. Here’s the list from the report, “Patient Apps for Improved Healthcare from Novelty to Mainstream”
- Fashion and beauty (e.g. salons)
- Apps intended for members of specific clubs/universities
- Veterinary apps
- Apps which use gimmicks with no real health benefit (for example, apps which make the user sound sick, or demonstrate how the user would look if they were obese)
- Apps related to health issues but which do not focus on health (such as fertility)
- Product presentation apps for use by sales reps/retailers
- Apps believed to have meaningless claims, such as: “gives you a beautiful way to keep track of your body’s biorhythms”
It reminds me of a similar assessment that was the focus of an investigative report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. It highlighted apps that made a variety of far-fetched claims from treating acne by harnessing the light from a smartphone to breast augmentation and pain relief.
The “genuine healthcare apps” included 7,400 designed for healthcare professionals and the rest of the 16,275 apps are patient-oriented.
One of the needs the report identifies is for some sort of consumer watchdog for apps in the consumer-facing healthcare realm. It sounds a bit like what was envisioned with Happtique through its certification program for medical apps. The report concludes that this would be an effective way to build confidence in these apps by the healthcare profession to help people manage their health.
