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‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps
Mobile health apps are health and wellness programs available on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In three systematic assessments published in BMC Medicine, Huckvale and colleagues demonstrate that widely available health apps meant to help patients calculate their appropriate insulin...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4583172/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26404791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0451-z |
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author | Wicks, Paul Chiauzzi, Emil |
author_facet | Wicks, Paul Chiauzzi, Emil |
author_sort | Wicks, Paul |
collection | PubMed |
description | Mobile health apps are health and wellness programs available on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In three systematic assessments published in BMC Medicine, Huckvale and colleagues demonstrate that widely available health apps meant to help patients calculate their appropriate insulin dosage, educate themselves about asthma, or perform other important functions are methodologically weak. Insulin dose calculators lacked user input validation and made inappropriate dose recommendations, with a lack of documentation throughout. Since 2011, asthma apps have become more interactive, but have not improved in quality; peak flow calculators have the same issues as the insulin calculators. A review of the accredited National Health Service Health Apps Library found poor and inconsistent implementation of privacy and security, with 28 % of apps lacking a privacy policy and one even transmitting personally identifying data the policy claimed would be anonymous. Ensuring patient safety might require a new approach, whether that be a consumer education program at one extreme or government regulation at the other. App store owners could ensure transparency of algorithms (whiteboxing), data sharing, and data quality. While a proper balance must be struck between innovation and caution, patient safety must be paramount. Please see related articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0444-y, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/106 and http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/58 |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4583172 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-45831722015-09-26 ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps Wicks, Paul Chiauzzi, Emil BMC Med Commentary Mobile health apps are health and wellness programs available on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. In three systematic assessments published in BMC Medicine, Huckvale and colleagues demonstrate that widely available health apps meant to help patients calculate their appropriate insulin dosage, educate themselves about asthma, or perform other important functions are methodologically weak. Insulin dose calculators lacked user input validation and made inappropriate dose recommendations, with a lack of documentation throughout. Since 2011, asthma apps have become more interactive, but have not improved in quality; peak flow calculators have the same issues as the insulin calculators. A review of the accredited National Health Service Health Apps Library found poor and inconsistent implementation of privacy and security, with 28 % of apps lacking a privacy policy and one even transmitting personally identifying data the policy claimed would be anonymous. Ensuring patient safety might require a new approach, whether that be a consumer education program at one extreme or government regulation at the other. App store owners could ensure transparency of algorithms (whiteboxing), data sharing, and data quality. While a proper balance must be struck between innovation and caution, patient safety must be paramount. Please see related articles: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0444-y, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/106 and http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/13/58 BioMed Central 2015-09-25 /pmc/articles/PMC4583172/ /pubmed/26404791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0451-z Text en © Wicks and Chiauzzi. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided 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 Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Commentary Wicks, Paul Chiauzzi, Emil ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title | ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title_full | ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title_fullStr | ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title_full_unstemmed | ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title_short | ‘Trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
title_sort | ‘trust but verify’ – five approaches to ensure safe medical apps |
topic | Commentary |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4583172/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26404791 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0451-z |
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