The Physician and Apps For Patients

Currently, both the Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store offer hundreds of mobile health apps. These apps claim to do everything from helping to lose weight, improve your diet, meditate, or avoid prescription interactions. 

The question to ask is: Which of these apps are potentially useful, and which of them are genuinely life-changing, merely a gimmick, a waste of money, snake oil?

Currently, there is NO way to have a clear way to determine which criteria any given app falls.

There have been some research into which apps are useful and there are also institutions with a long history of applications that have been applauded by physicians and patients.

Doctors should be in a position to leveraging their technical skills to root out the most valuable apps.

In a recent article it was indicated that “A doctor that is tech-savvy enough to filter the helpful and trustworthy ones could help certain groups of people, such as young people with diabetes.” says Omar Rayward, an ophthalmologist-turned-computer programmer, helped build an iPhone app called Vida Health.