App Store
Medical section for iPhone is plagued by non-medical apps
There are well over 3,000 apps in the “medical” section of the App Store for the iPhone. Unfortunately, a growing number of them aren’t medical apps. It’s already difficult enough to parse through the litany of apps available to find quality apps – and then when you add apps that shouldn’t even be in the medical category, it makes the job that much harder.
Lets start with the “top 10 downloaded free iphone medical apps” in the App Store. Notice how the word “downloaded” is in bold. By no means do we think these apps are the best free iphone medical apps – we’ve already chronicled that list in another post.
These are the top 10 downloaded free medical apps in the App Store: Medscape, Sex-Facts, Epocrates, Medpage Today, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, Medical Encyclopedia, Body Systems – Anatomy Quiz, and Best Diet foods. Note, Medscape, Epocrates, and Medpage Today are extremely legitimate apps – they even made our top 10 free iphone medical apps list. Sex-Facts, Marijuana Truth, iAugment, Dream Meaning, and Best diet foods will never make any top 10 list of ours.
By our calculations, 12 of the top 25 downloaded medical apps, 48 percent, are mis-categorized and should not be in the medical section. So we looked into this a bit further.
Acne “treatment” apps could be taking advantage of patients
Getting a new medication or medical device approved in the United States requires embarking on path so nightmarish it makes Dante’s Inferno look like the yellow brick road. And while most clinicians and bureaucrats would agree that we need to find a better way, its not hard to imagine how we ended up with such a complex regulatory structure. Going back over 2,000 years to the Hippocratic Oath, the practice of medicine has rested largely on two principles – beneficence and non-maleficence. The latter refers to the idea that we, as clinicians, first do no harm while the former requires that we act foremost in the best interest of the patient. In attempting to uphold these principles, we have created an enormous regulatory structure intended to act as a sieve allowing only those interventions of proven benefit to reach the general public.
I don’t claim its anywhere close to a perfect system. And as there are enormous amounts of money at stake, often involving a very vulnerable group of people, its our responsibility to stay vigilant against those who attempt to manipulate the system as well as treatments that are of questionable value. And there are a small group of app developers whose apps may fall into the latter category with claims to treat acne with light – well, that is unless a patient is willing to hold their iPhone to their face for the next 100 years.
How to sync the right user with the right medical app for their iPhone, iPod Touch, and the upcoming iPad
With over 100,000 apps available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and billions of downloads since the App Store opened just under two years ago, the market is clearly hot. And with the release of the iPad, expect a new flood of apps into the market. However, a recent article in the New York Times suggests that even with the wealth of options, people generally use only five apps despite having downloaded far more.
The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.
Another finding that the article notes is that even thought hundreds of thousands of apps are available, the entire user group is generally exposed to the same few thousand apps.
A survey of iPhones, iPod Touch and Android users conducted in July 2009 by AdMob, an advertising network that helps people promote their applications on smartphones, found that people discover apps most often by browsing app stores. And even though the iTunes store is bloated with offerings, people tend to gravitate to the most popular….
“…The top apps featured at the store do change out,” Mr. Putney said. “But most users will never see more than 1 percent of the total apps available.”
These findings are important for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users, app developers, and even us here at iMedicalApps, and here’s why. For users, this means that finding the best apps requires some work – a conscious effort to search the app store for things that interest you. That includes looking beyond the most popular medical apps. For developers, this means that reaching potential customers requires finding ways to climb that popularity ladder. For the Malcolm Gladwell enthusiasts, this means finding the Mavens, Connectors, and Salesman (from Tipping Point) – basically the people with large social (or professional) networks who are most likely to adopt early and spread the message about your great app. And for us here at iMedicalApps, it means actively looking for that diamond in the rough, languishing at the bottom of the popularity rankings, and helping our readers discover useful apps they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
What Exactly are the App Store’s Medical Standards?
Recently, I posted on a controversial healthcare application that claims to treat seasonal depression. In my post, I talked about the ridiculous app and wondered if the App Store approval process needed to be tweaked when it came to medical and healthcare apps. Then I started wondering if there are actual medical standards the App Store has in place. There was a nice write up done by PC World talking about how the lack of overall set standards are hurting developers and the end users. But what about medical standards in the App Store Approval process? That’ll be the discussion of this post.
