The results from an online quantitative survey reveal what patients REALLY think of mobile health and they do not align with the current “buzz” around the channel. n=1774
Mobile Health Apps
KEY TAKEAWAY: Dr. James Madara, CEO of the American Medical Association (AMA), during the 2016 Annual AMA meeting said “the current landscape of medical IT innovation has lack of evidence and medical oversight in a new areas of healthcare that could present potential dangers for patients.
KEY TAKEAWAY: There is a HUGE disconnect between what people say they would do and what they would actually do when it comes to mobile health. Sure, they say that would wear a device to track things like blood pressure but how are they going to use the data and is the data really accurate.
The Journal of Health Communication recently published a paper raising serious concerns about the attention and hope piled onto such technology, largely because so much of it was “unsupervised” and relied on patients’ faithfully recording their activities. This year researchers at Johns Hopkins published one of the first papers to put health apps through a sort of rigorous equivalent to medical trials. The findings showed the apps were mediocre at best. Most of the apps’ ability to manage disease was of “low quality, and nearly all were undertaken in high-income countries,” they wrote.
POST SUMMARY: Developing an app may not the answer for DTC marketers who want to improve bottom line results. Apps require a lot of money to develop and most patients don’t want to be reminded that they have chronic health problems but there are opportunities for tose willing to blaze new trails NOW.