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. 2018 Dec 3;16(1):225.
doi: 10.1186/s12916-018-1211-7.

How can clinicians, specialty societies and others evaluate and improve the quality of apps for patient use?

Jeremy C Wyatt  1
Affiliations

How can clinicians, specialty societies and others evaluate and improve the quality of apps for patient use?

Jeremy C Wyatt. BMC Med. .

Erratum in

Abstract

Background: Health-related apps have great potential to enhance health and prevent disease globally, but their quality currently varies too much for clinicians to feel confident about recommending them to patients. The major quality concerns are dubious app content, loss of privacy associated with widespread sharing of the patient data they capture, inaccurate advice or risk estimates and the paucity of impact studies. This may explain why current evidence about app use by people with health-related conditions is scanty and inconsistent.

Main text: There are many concerns about health-related apps designed for use by patients, such as poor regulation and implicit trust in technology. However, there are several actions that various stakeholders, including users, developers, health professionals and app distributors, can take to tackle these concerns and thus improve app quality. This article focuses on the use of checklists that can be applied to apps, novel evaluation methods and suggestions for how clinical specialty organisations can develop a low-cost curated app repository with explicit risk and quality criteria.

Conclusions: Clinicians and professional societies must act now to ensure they are using good quality apps, support patients in choosing between available apps and improve the quality of apps under development. Funders must also invest in research to answer important questions about apps, such as how clinicians and patients decide which apps to use and which app factors are associated with effectiveness.

Keywords: Digital healthcare; Evaluation methods; Health apps; Health policy; Mobile phone; Quality and safety; Quality checklist; Regulation; Smart phone; e-Health; mHealth.

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Conflict of interest statement

Author’s information

Jeremy Wyatt is a professor of digital healthcare at Southampton University and advises several national bodies about digital health evaluation and regulation.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

JCW is a Clinical Advisor on New Technologies to the RCP and a member of the MHRA’s Devices Expert Advisory Committee and the Care Quality Commission’s Digital Primary Care Advisory Group.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Reasons why poor app quality is common and widely tolerated. These include the large number of apps, poor clinical engagement and understanding by developers, and lack of empirical testing
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Comparison of Apple iTunes App Store or Google Play store rank (vertical axis, inverse scale) with the quality of the underlying evidence on which 47 smoking cessation apps are based. The higher the evidence score (x axis), the more the app conforms to relevant guidelines from the US Preventive Service Task Force. The lower the store rank (y axis, reverse scale), the higher the app is listed in the App Store or Google Play store. The brown ellipse shows a cluster of low quality, high ranked apps, while the blue ellipse shows a cluster of high quality, low ranked apps. Author’s analysis based on data from Abroms et al. [13]
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Suggested process for organisations to establish a sustainable curated app repository, based on explicit quality and risk criteria
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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