Success of apps hinges on trust, usability and convenience

BOSTON—Health apps still have a long way to go before achieving goals of wellness and facilitating healthcare delivery. Issues surrounding usability, trust and convenience remain hurdles, according to speakers at the mHealth + Telehealth World 2014 on July 23.

Big data is revolutionizing healthcare, said Jared Reitzen, CEO and owner of mobileStorm and owner of mHealth watch, predicting that gamification will help motivate healthy behaviors in consumers given that it is personalized and engaging.

However, at the present time, poor design of apps is a “really big problem.” Healthcare needs to strive for simplicity in a way that Apple did under Steve Jobs, he said. “We need to bring healthcare closer to Silicon Valley.”

“If consumers engaging in healthcare is difficult or arduous, they’ll opt out,” he added.

For success, data accessibility is paramount, and requires a national network of linked health information that is buttressed by strong authentication and transparency, he said. “We have to be a paragon of integrity and not break trust.”

Trust begins by establishing with patients that in many ways, the paper record actually is less secure than EHRs, said Mansur Hasib, DSc, cybersecurity faculty at Capitol College and former CIO at Baltimore City Health Department.

Paper records cannot be encrypted or protected from damage. Plus, if someone unauthorized sees a digital record, "we’d know who saw it and how long they saw it,” he said.

As data become digital and accessible to patients, they would ultimately own it, Hasib said.  

“I don’t think we’ve hit the sweet spot yet,” said Neil Pierce, enterprise business lead of e-communications at Humana. Getting people engaged with health insurance is difficult. He said the payer is moving from a health insurance platform called Vitality that emphasizes wellness.

Data in electronic form that can move from one setting to the next utilizing mobile apps, is “the sweet spot,” said Chris Boyer, associate vice president, digital strategy, at North Shore-LIJ Health System. These data would move to wherever the patient opts to receive care.

“The public’s interests have changed. With the advent of retail clinics, patients are more interested in the convenience of what to do, not where. It doesn’t matter where the care is,” he said.