Commonwealth Fund Contemplates Mobile Health Apps for Patients with Chronic Illnesses
For the roughly half of all Americans with chronic health problems, there are more than 165,000 mobile health apps designed to help them deal with a wide range of illnesses and conditions.
But therein lies the problem: the choices among apps are overwhelming, their quality is highly varied, and organized medicine has largely been reluctant to take a role in evaluating or recommending specific products.
We recently talked to Commonwealth Fund grantee Karandeep Singh, M.D., about the current state of mobile health apps, some of the challenges to evaluating and rating them, and the potential of these tools to help patients manage their conditions and engage with their peers. Singh and colleagues published an article on mobile health apps in this month’s Health Affairs...