Majority of mHealth apps unsuccessful to involve patients

While various healthcare experts have harbored high hopes for mobile apps to energize patient engagement, merely a minority of the applications appear to beat the mark.

An analysis of over 1,000 patient-facing health apps aimed at people with chronic diseases has found that merely 43% of iOS apps and 27% of Android apps are beneficial for that purpose.

Funded by The Commonwealth Fund, the research evaluated 376 apps present in the Apple iTunes store and 569 apps in the Android Google Play store to determine usefulness deployed on the following criteria: description of engagement, relevance to the aimed patient population, customer ratings and reviews, and most latest app update.

Overall, 161 (43%) iOS apps and 152 (27%) Android apps were deemed as being “possibly” beneficial; of that total, 126 apps exist on both platforms.

“There were many apps that we call ‘limited engagement’ on Android—over 90, compared with over 25 that were iOS,” analyzes Karandeep Singh, MD, an author of the research and assistant professor in the University of Michigan Medical School’s Department of Learning Health Sciences.

In accordance to Singh, there were primarily more Android apps in contrast to iOS apps that were not recently upgraded—200 Android apps (35%) were last upgraded before the year 2014, while 63 iOS (17%) apps were last upgraded before the year 2014.

The research found that 33 iOS apps (9%) were found to have worse ratings or reviews, compared with 8 Android apps (1%).

“While apps have exceptional potential to involve high-need, high-cost populations, a minority of sufferer-facing health applications on both the Apple and Android stores seems likely to be beneficial to sufferers,” summarizes the research.

This deficiency of app usefulness for customers is specifically disconcerting provided that a separate recent research by research2guidance discovered that app stores such as Apple iTunes and Android Google Play will sustain the primary distribution channel for mHealth apps until the year 2020. That reverses a trend analyzed in various previous surveys by the firm, which predicted that hospitals and physicians would be top distributors of apps.

The research firm summarizes that both Apple and Google are “complicit” in the marketing hype around several of these apps.

“1 of the main promises of mHealth apps is that they assist their consumers change their behavior,” in accordance to the firm. “The majority of mHealth apps today do not even come close to living up to this promise because they lose their consumers after a few days and thus have no possibility to change any behavior.”

Most of the apps presently present in the marketplace are published by Apple and Google, with each of the 2 main app stores offering nearly 70,000 apps within the “Health and Fitness” (56%) and “Medical” (44%). Of medical apps, 12% target chronic illnesses. Within that group, apps that claim to assist obesity management represent the highest therapy field (29%) including the huge section of weight loss apps, followed by diabetes (20%) and cancer (19%).

“The concentration on chronic illnesses is highly deployed on the high cost of treating those sufferers and the promise that apps could help decrease these costs by changing the behavior of sufferers over a longer period of time,” claims the firm’s report. “In many cases, this is still an unfulfilled promise, as most of the apps are unsuccessful to retain their consumers for even a few weeks.”