The market is flooded with apps and digital technologies that promise to improve outcomes and strengthen the physician-patient relationship. But to achieve that health care executives need evidence and guidelines to inform which technologies are safe and effective to recommend to patients, and which are not.
“Health care is at an interesting moment,” said Aneesh Chopra, President, CareJourney. “We have to run to the new digital world while operating on legacy technology that feels looks more and more like a money pit of custom interfaces, and bespoke connections.”
Relative to facilitating a new level of IT deployment to move into that era, CEOs can spearhead their organization’s efforts to drive impactful change in two critical areas:
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- Digital health and app experience
- Governance and use of patient data in health IT products
This article will examine digital health and app experience and the second in this two-part series will focus on patient data governance in health IT products.
How health care organizations are approaching apps for patient use
Health Evolution Forum’s preliminary survey data found that organizations take the following approaches to developing lists of recommended apps for patient use:
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- We develop our own list of recommended apps – 44%
- We use a third party’s list of recommended apps – 6%
- We leave it to individual clinicians to make recommendations – 0%
- We have not yet developed an approach for recommending apps for patients – 50%
“A majority basically said, ‘we do not yet have a plan for recommending or managing these apps,’” Chopra noted. “There’s an opportunity to add a bit more guidance to patients as it relates to privacy warnings for apps that fail to adhere to industry codes of conduct, for example.”
