An overview of

regulated health Apps

In 2008 Apple launched the App Store and Google the Play Store, now a decade later, their impact on our daily life has become very clear since their start more than a decade ago. It started with some simple games, but now Apps exists for everything imaginable. Communication, news, photo editing, banking, buying train tickets, gps... it's all possible with your smartphone. What was still a young and unstable market ten years ago has grown into the next big thing of the past decade.

This evolution has not escaped the medical sector. In Belgium, 80% of the population has a smartphone, and more than half of the over-65 year old's (up to 75 years) have a smartphone. This is a huge market and a huge opportunity for the medical sector. With the increasing costs of healthcare and the increasing aging of the population, technology can be of great help. Smart devices that monitor patients' continuous parameters and notify the treating physician via the smartphone if something goes wrong, can help doctors follow up on chronically ill patients. Applications that help monitor their treatment can increase patient compliance and make therapies cost-effective. Applications that help stop smoking or other addictions have shown promising results.

Not only do patients walk around with a smartphone in their pocket, most physicians also have one. A simple device that connects to your smartphone allows you to easily make echoes in different locations and you can edit and forward the images directly. A digital stethoscope can record the sounds and link them directly to the patient record. Several patients who are monitored in the hospital can follow their vital parameters in real time with a look at your tablet or smartphone.

Meanwhile, there are about 320,000 mobile applications that are health-related (spread over 2 major App stores) and more than 200 are added each day. However, these applications are not medically verified when they are accepted by Google or Apple in their digital stores. As a result, many of the most popular apps in the medical category are not scientifically proven. Many patients expect their (general) physician to give them information about mobile health apps, but it is still very difficult to find reliable information about these applications in one central place. A number of scientifically tested applications have made the effort to get a European CE-Mark and/or an American FDA-approval. Also in Belgium, Minister of Health Maggie De Block is testing certain applications and drawing up possible approval and reimbursement criteria.

See therefore this site.

Despite this, until now it remains a challenge to check whether an application has received a form of medical approval.

That is why we have created a simple database of regulated applications, along with useful information (iOS or Android, free or paying, available in Dutch, which mark of approvals ...) which will be added gradually. Clicking the header sorts a list alphabetically. We hope that this will help physicians to make an informed decision about the use of mobile medical applications in their practice.

We also invite you to improve this database. Good or bad experiences can be useful for your colleagues. Obviously, any errata or updates may also always be reported via apps@healthskouts.com.

Prof. Dr. Koen Kas
Andreas Van de Vyver - Student Medicine Ghent University

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