Journal article : Review
What is the clinical value of mHealth for patients?
- Abstract:
- Despite growing interest from both patients and healthcare providers, there is little clinical guidance on how mobile apps should be utilized to add value to patient care. We categorize apps according to their functionality (e.g. preventative behavior change, digital self-management of a specific condition, diagnostic) and discuss evidence for effectiveness from published systematic reviews and meta-analyses and the relevance to patient care. We discuss the limitations of the current literature describing clinical outcomes from mHealth apps, what FDA clearance means now (510(k)/de novo FDA clearance) and in the future. We discuss data security and privacy as a major concern for patients when using mHealth apps. Patients are often not involved in the development of mobile health guidelines, and professionals' views regarding high-quality health apps may not reflect patients' views. We discuss efforts to develop guidelines for the development of safe and effective mHealth apps in the US and elsewhere and the role of independent app reviews sites in identifying mHealth apps for patient care. There are only a small number of clinical scenarios where published evidence suggests that mHealth apps may improve patient outcomes.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 496.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41746-019-0206-x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Journal:
- npj Digital Medicine More from this journal
- Volume:
- 3
- Issue:
- 2020
- Pages:
- 4
- Publication date:
- 2020-01-13
- Acceptance date:
- 2019-11-22
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2398-6352
- ISSN:
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2398-6352
- Pmid:
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31970289
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subtype:
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Review
- Pubs id:
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1085943
- Local pid:
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pubs:1085943
- Deposit date:
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2020-04-28
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Rowland et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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