Healthcare Apps to Recommend to Patients

Hello. I'm Dr Arefa Cassoobhoy, a practicing internist, Medscape advisor, and senior medical director for WebMD. Welcome to Morning Report, our 1-minute news story for primary care.

Rating the Healthcare Apps

New apps for health and disease are coming on the market every day and now number more than 300,000. There are so many of them that clinicians might have a hard time deciding which to recommend to their patients.

A new study aims to help by rating the best healthcare apps. The authors identified top apps by looking at 571 published studies, including randomized trials.

Highly rated apps fall into two categories of interest to clinicians. The first is prevention and wellness, and includes apps for exercise, weight management, stress, and smoking cessation. The top disease-management apps include those for cancer, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma. Other notable apps cover atrial fibrillation, cardiac rehab, and substance abuse.

Here's a list and links to the most highly clinically rated apps (Tables 1 and 2). Apps might not work for everyone, but the digital health movement suggests that they have a role for some of your patients and may make your life easier by helping your patients to better manage their health.

Table 1. Top Clinically Rated Apps for Wellness and Prevention

Category	App	Maker
Exercise	FitBit	FitBit
Healthy eating and weight management	Noom Coach: Health and Weight	Noom
Stress management	Headspace	Headspace
Smoking cessation	Clickotine	Click Therapeutics
Alcohol moderation	Drinkaware	Drinkaware Trust
Source: IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science

Table 2. Top Clinically Rated Apps for Condition Management

Condition	App	Maker
Alcohol and substance abuse	Pear reSet	Pear Therapeutics
Diabetes prevention	Omada	Omada Health
Diabetes	BlueStar Diabetes	WellDoc
Atrial fibrillation screening and dysrhythmias	Kardia	AliveCor
Hypertension	Twine-Collaborative Care	Twine Health
Cardiac rehabilitation	Healarium (Mayo Clinic Instance)	Apollo Medical Holdings
Cancer	MoovCare	Sivan Innovations
Asthma	Propeller Health	Reciprocal Labs dba Propeller Health
Source: IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science

Follow Dr Cassoobhoy on Twitter at @ArefaMD

Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.

Cite this: Healthcare Apps to Recommend to Patients - Medscape - Dec 01, 2017.

Commenting is limited to medical professionals. To comment please Log-in.

Comments on Medscape are moderated and should be professional in tone and on topic. You must declare any conflicts of interest related to your comments and responses. Please see our Commenting Guide for further information. We reserve the right to remove posts at our sole discretion.

My Alerts