Periodo: 2018
URL: Evaluation of Free Android Healthcare Apps Listed in appsanitarie.it Database: Technical Analysis, Survey Results and Suggestions for Developers.
Descrizione:
Apps on mobile devices such as smartphone offer a lot of perspectives of use in health and medical fields. App economy as the whole range of economic activity related to mobile applications evolve rapidly as the smartphone market. Other studies report that only the first 10 top mobile health apps generate up to 4 million free and 300.000 paid downloads per day1.
On the other side Healthcare researches find that vast majority of professionals is conscious of an interoperability lack for a better use of patient generated data2. Other researches show that more than half of the interviewed patients assert to have used a digital device including mobile apps to manage their health and almost two thirds think it would be helpful for their healthcare providers to have access to their patient generated data as part of their medical history3.
Studies showed that for patients with chronic diseases it is a comfortable solution sharing data with healthcare providers via online patient portal, mobile apps or message texts4. This could lead to some sort of benefits for both patients and healthcare providers but also expose to some risks, especially the first ones5,6. Unclear disclosures about data processing terms could lead to privacy risks for the user and insufficient security could bring to data breaches or loss risks, considering also that a smartphone loss could bring to a leakage7. Security or data protection could be not sufficient if the user is not fully capable to prevent the loss of data from the device or mechanisms as encryption or passwords are not available8.
On the other hand sharing patients health data with messaging and multimedia mobile applications as communication channels it’s handy for a professional but non completely compliant with health data protection standards a healthcare trust certainly adopt9. On the patient side new findings concluded that while less than half of the analyzed apps are useful to the targeted user, some apps seemed to sacrifice quality and safety to add more functionalities10.
The purpose of this study is to make a technical analysis of free android apps listed in a dedicated “healthcare apps” database, “Banca Dati delle app sanitarie” (at http://www.appsanitarie.it/banca-dati-app-sanitarie). The database has been developed as part of a Formit Foundation project financed by a grant of the General Directorate of Medical Devices and Pharmaceutical Service of the Italian Ministry of Health in 2015-2016. Launched in 2015 the database was created to list results of the apps census operated by the Observatory of the health apps established by Formit Foundation.
Apps in the database has been selected through a specific definition, “healthcare apps”, and selection workflow (see methods section for a full description). Database apps, both Android and iOS, have been selected through specific criteria in the stores (summoned in a workflow), and could be used in an healthcare context by patients and physicians. The database apps considered are 659 “healthcare apps”, divided in medical branches and 2% of them present a CE mark as medical device. The database has been chosen as starting point for the selection of listed apps because of a clear definition and a selection workflow.
The study which results will be here presented has not been conducted looking in the inner working mechanisms of the apps but with a highly technical analysis of the functionalities available to users. Analysis has been carried out facing four different groups of app characteristic: the app general details; the features as requested data, data entry, data access, connect-ability, online and sharing feature; password and backup security mechanisms; privacy terms and scientific references. Regulatory framework considered in matter of privacy is the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR (Regulation EU 2016/679)11 due to its validity all over national member states legislations, and the Privacy Code of Conduct on mHealth apps for what concerns guidelines to enhance privacy in this field12.