Iltifat Husain has seen an awful lot of sickness and injury during his time as an emergency room doctor, but lately, he's worried about something new. He's worried about the ill effects of mobile healthcare apps.
There are hundreds of medically themed apps in Apple's App Store and Google Play, and by most accounts, they've been wonderful tools for tracking, evaluating, and taking control of our personal health. Husain loves apps such as Draw MD, which lets physicians draw out surgical procedures for patients, and MicroMedex, a prescription drug reference encyclopedia. But he's concerned about the emergence of untested apps that are marketed as replacements for legitimate medical equipment—apps such as Instant Blood Pressure, which purports to take your blood pressure by way of the iPhone.
According to Husain, a faculty member in the Emergency Medicine department at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, these apps could very well land someone in his E.R.—and maybe even get them killed.
He's not alone in his concern. With an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine last week, Nathan Cortez, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in Dallas, Texas, called attention to this problem, and you'll hear much same complaint from Eric Topol, a medical doctor and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute. "These apps have no validated data compared with accepted reference standards and therefore are quite concerning," he says.
Although Husain believes these apps could be seriously harmful, the good news is that the FDA says it is now working to crack down on questionable healthcare apps, and some app makers may be willing to provide additional disclosures about their software when pushed to do so.
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