Do You Have a Prescription For That Mobile Health App?

 Yesterday at 3:33 pm   by Amanda Guisbond Posted in #mHealth, App, Health, patients Every week, there’s a different article, tweet or blog post about the latest/greatest #mHealth app and its benefit to patients.  In the excitement over all these great, new innovative mobile health apps, one can forget to ask very important questions:  Will the average patient download a personal health management app?  What about those consumers who don’t even own a smart phone, and are still living in a mobile Internet-free zone?  Last week, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project answered part of this dilemma.  Pew released, among other awesome things, data on our “digital differences” including stats on Internet, cell phone and smartphone adoption rates by age and ethnicity.  Most notably to this discussion is slide #26 which shows that only 34 percent of Baby Boomers own a smartphone.  Not surprisingly that number drops to 13 percent for those over the age of 65. Baby Boomers comprise a large portion of the target patient population; not only are they dual caregivers (potentially taking care of children and elderly parents) but they’re also having to look out for their own health and potential threats such as cancer, memory loss and the country’s #1 killer: heart disease.  Baby Boomers are also more likely to be taking medications for aging-related conditions such as high blood pressure, and medication adherence is another important skill for them to master. Yet, creating a mobile health app for this crowd may seem silly when the majority of them don’t even own a smart phone with an App store.  As for those that do, what percentage of that 34 percent are going to download a health app and actually use it? Thankfully, some folks are catching on and devising new approaches to increase mHealth adoption among those who need it most:  a new program covered by InformationWeek allows healthcare providers to prescribe patients a mHealth app.  Happtique is a “mobile health application store” that lets doctors send a health app in Android or HTML5 format directly to their smartphone OR tablet, and if it’s in the iOS format, can use a mobile prescription to send an email to the patient’s device directing them to download the app in the Apple store.  Happtique is piloting the program with about 100 doctors and maybe more importantly, will be tracking to see if patients are more likely to download and use the apps as a result.