As we get caught up in a digital healthcare revolution, how can consumers pick through the thousands of health and wellbeing apps on offer to find the credible ones that work?
Many consumers will first of all look for trusted brands. When Weightwatchers launched its app, the brand finally found its feet with a whole new audience of younger ‘leading edge’ type dieters who don’t want to go to the church hall meetings and engage with the old fashioned agenda. Instead they latch onto the tracking tools and online database of recipes and points values. The interface is almost game-like and suits the emerging mentality of ‘working on a level’, which a generation of computer gaming has inculcated.
The NHS is in a prime position as a trusted national brand, to develop audiences for healthcare apps that go beyond just monitoring and tracking and can actually allow patients to manage conditions and work in partnership with their healthcare professionals. To this end, the NHS launched a Health Apps Library in 2013 as a pilot site to review and recommend apps against a defined set of criteria. This pilot led to the instigation of a high level NHS work stream to to provide citizens with access to a set of NHS and care digital applications which have been endorsed by the NHS to enable them to make the right health and care choices. The premises of the work stream are that endorsement can encourage health and care professionals to recommend the use of safe and effective digital applications and give greater confidence to patients and citizens to select and use them.
Indeed, doctors will soon be able to prescribe apps as part of a treatment plan, due to the regulation, accreditation and kitemarking of technology and data enabled services.
Indigo is excited by the prospect of this kind of endorsement, which we believe will contribute to the development of a dynamic and sustainable healthcare app market in the UK. Award-winning products such as the ActiveME app and the Childhood Illness app developed by Indigo for the NHS could reach a much larger audience and therefore benefit more people as a result of this new regulatory framework. Creating a marketplace for distribution of endorsed healthcare app products will also encourage more private investment into the sector thereby increasing competition, quality and pace of innovation. The end result is more choice and better products for consumers.