ATA Launches New Resource for Evaluating mHealth Apps

The American Telemedicine Association is launching a resource for curating mHealth apps.

The ATA announced a partnership last week with the Organization for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA), a UK-based digital health evaluator already working with its National Health Service and governmental organizations in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia.

The partnership aims to give healthcare providers, payers and others and online platform to measure mHealth apps against more than 300 standards developed by ORCHA to measure an app’s reliability, safety and effectiveness.

“The proliferation of health apps has created challenges for healthcare providers and patients seeking to find the most appropriate, safe, and effective health apps to monitor their health and wellness, maintain a healthy lifestyle, and securely collect and transmit personal health information,” ATA CEO Ann Mond Johnson said in a press release. “Chat-based interactions and asynchronous tools are an important component of telehealth offerings and can help ensure that everyone has access to safe, effective, and appropriate care when and where they need it.”

The move, announced during last week’s HLTH VRTL conference, places the ATA in a growing field of groups looking to corral the hundreds of thousands of apps on the market – sometimes referred to as the “Wild Wild West” – into categories so that providers and payers can recommend safe and effective ones to consumers.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) launched its own effort four years ago with Xcertia, a partnership with the American Medical Association, American Heart Association and DHX Group. In 2018, the NHS rolled out its mHealth Library, aiming to give providers and consumers a trusted resource for choosing apps and digital health services.

More recently, organizations like Express Scripts have developed formularies to give their members guidance in choosing connected health services.

The ATA-ORCHA deal aims to tackle a consistent problem with mHealth apps: quality. According to ORCHA officials, only 15 percent of more than 4,000 apps available in the US that have been evaluated by the organization have met its quality threshholds – including less than 30 percent of 584 apps designed to address mental health conditions.

“There are many safe and effective health apps built by U.S. innovation companies that have the potential to help individuals create and sustain healthy habits, monitor health conditions, and share important personal health information with their providers, family members, and caregivers,” ATA President Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, who’s a professor at Harvard Medical School and Editor-in-Chief of npj Digital Medicine, said in the press release. ”The mission of the ATA is to create access to quality care for all individuals and this is another important step, ensuring people have access to safe and appropriate digital health apps.”