CEO Julie Bretland explains to George Underwood from Pharma Times what the company looks for in a good app and how digital health can change the industry.
Our Mobile Health helps identify, assess, review, curate and distribute good high quality health apps, so that health and care organisations can recommend, deploy and ultimately prescribe digital health services with confidence.
What that means is that we find really good apps and, depending on the project, we make them available in a library. For example, we assess apps for the NHS apps library and the NHS Tariff, we partner with EMIS to provide the EMIS App library powered by Our Mobile Health for GPs, we work with Parkinson’s UK to identify and make available apps relevant to people with Parkinson's and we assess apps for London’s Good Thinking Project.
What is the importance of assessing healthcare apps?
We found that, quite rightly, many healthcare professionals didn’t trust apps, even though they can offer such tremendous benefits for patients in terms of understanding their own health, creating healthier behaviours and managing particular conditions. The reason for the lack of confidence by professionals is partially because they don’t really know how to judge them and you can’t judge an app just by downloading it and having a look at it. That doesn’t tell you about where the data is hosted or the encryption being used or whether the data is being used, shared or sold or whether they comply with patient safety standards or are registered with the relevant regulating body.
By assessing apps, healthcare organisations can adopt apps at scale. It means that companies work with a portfolio of apps, thus minimising their risk and increasing the choice of apps for patients, so that they can find one which suits them and that they are more likely to engage with over a longer period of time. Continued...
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