How can clinicians specialty societies and others evaluate and improve the quality of apps for patient use?

摘要

BackgroundHealth-related apps have great potential to enhance health and prevent disease globally, but their quality currently varies too much for clinicians to feel confident about recommending them to patients. The major quality concerns are dubious app content, loss of privacy associated with widespread sharing of the patient data they capture, inaccurate advice or risk estimates and the paucity of impact studies. This may explain why current evidence about app use by people with health-related conditions is scanty and inconsistent.