How Health Apps on Smartphones can Revolutionize Healthcare Practice

With the rise of health apps it is now possible to chart your steps, heartbeat, and sleep patterns. Mobile devices could rapidly reshape the practice of medicine by enabling smooth cross-platform communications, suggested Ken Mandl, Isaac Kohane, and Joshua Mandel of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. These next-generation software tools could also help reduce healthcare costs. But the availability of this constant stream of information has yet to reach patient electronic health records.

President Barack Obama declared the development of personalized medicine a priority in his 2015 State of the Union Address. While most initiatives are focused on sequencing patient genomes, experts argue that an individual’s genetic information could be put to even better use if it was linked to app-fueled, electronic health record systems.

Mental Health Apps May Lead to Over-Diagnoses and Increase the Number of Check-Ups
Apps can never understand nuances of questions about progression and intensity, which are only possible with face-to-face interactions.

The author’s said, "How will the innovations from the President’s initiative reach the doctor and the patient, and how will the new data types needed for precision medicine be integrated into medical decision making? Electronic health records are not designed for storage or display of genomic data nor for the computation that will no doubt be needed to eventually tailor therapy to a patient’s genome."

The study highlighted that one problem is that current electronic health record systems do not support standardized interfaces for accessing data contained within them. Therefore, it is time consuming and costly to develop tools for using these data to improve healthcare, and the resulting tools, and the best practices they embody, can be difficult to transfer between clinics.

The authors also outlined how recent collaborations between major hospitals, technology vendors, federal committees and industry organizations are accelerating the adoption of standard application programming interfaces for reading and writing data from electronic health record systems. Researchers said, "A good app, distributed widely, could reshape practice overnight."

Lack of Behavior-change Techniques in Mobile Health Apps
For top rated physical activity apps, behavior-change techniques are not very well represented in marketing materials, a team of researchers have found.

The study has been published in the Cell Systems.

Source-IANS

Do Health Apps Help People Improve Their Health or Harm Them?
While one expert argues that health apps can make a broad impact on the health, another explains that there is not enough evidence to support such claims.

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The federal government is looking to enforce some guidelines to enhance the safety of mobile health applications for smart phones and tablet computers.