The future of medicine won’t be about "health apps"

The future of medicine won’t be about "health apps"

In the unconscious mind, an "app" is a small program available on smartphone, offered either for free or for less than a euro, and that gives a service. In health care, this simple question of wording has therefore a pejorative connotation of "gadget".

Thus, the specialized and general media often list the Top 10 or Top 20 most useful health apps, mixing indifferently medical specialties: choose an app, choose a disease.

Should we list the Moovcare solution which demonstrated a very significant improvement in the survival of patients suffering from lung cancer alongside other medical "apps" giving information for instance about pregnancy simply because they use the same technology?

Wouldn’t it be considering means before objectives?

Indeed, in other areas, taxis don’t fight the “Uber app” but the Uber service, and the bank evolution isn’t to provide an “app” but the possibility to access your account anytime, anywhere.

Coming back to health, it reminds me a meeting of experts to which I was invited. A very famous professor of psychiatry presented his "app" to follow-up depressed patients. He was then challenged by one of his colleagues of a certain age on the fact that the medical body would not adopt it because "everyone is not at ease with a smartphone". Would he have had the same reaction if he had been presented with a “medical solution” allowing him to understand throughout the day the very subtle emotions of his patient, finally adding that it required a smartphone?

Presenting this service in a different manner with a different wording can help to get away from a technological fashion, and to further credibilize a medical approach.

To truly integrate mobile technologies in the history of medicine, let’s abandon the term "health app" and evolve rather towards the concept of "mobile medical solution". By consequence, let’s stop comparing health apps between them, blithely mixing apples, oranges, apps for the cardiac patient and those for the asthmatic one, but let’s compare the different approaches of management of the patient, using traditional ways or mobile ones.

Only then will we establish a credible basis for Medicine to be really interested in it, evaluate whether a mobile approach is effective, whether it will be prescribed, and ultimately reimbursed.

Ken Masters

Associate Professor at Sultan Qaboos University

7y

No, please, don't. For the lay person, medical jargon is impenetrable enough. Leave the term as it is. Is there something that makes medical people insecure when the lay person actually understands what is being discussed? You want to to rename the "health app" to "mobile medical solution"? What's next? Give it a Latin or Greek name to really make it "medical"? Please, just leave it alone!

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