Happtique provides doctors with help in giving people mobile advice along with their medication.
With the increasing popularity of mhealth applications and features, it may soon become commonplace for doctors to recommend apps for their patients’ smartphones along with the medication that has been prescribed.
There are already thousands of health and medicine applications currently available.
Some estimates of the numbers of these apps are as high as 40,000, though no complete count of the applications for download has ever been performed. These mhealth apps provide a broad range of different services and benefits. They range from everything from checking heart rates, counting steps like a pedometer, monitoring diabetes, counting calories, or even looking up symptoms.
This enormous number of mhealth apps can make it very difficult for doctors to know what is available.
It is virtually impossible for health practitioners to keep up with the rapid evolution of this field. There are simply too many mhealth products entering the digital market space with every passing day, while others drop off.
It is in this struggle that Happtique has been designed to provide assistance. This enterprise is a subsidiary of the Greater New York Hospital Association and is a form of screened app pharmacy that features applications that have been chosen because they have met certain basic standards of approval.
According to Ben Chodor, the chief executive at Happtique, “There is little barrier to entry in building an app.” He explained that “The biggest problem we were finding in the marketplace was. . .app clutter. People were saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know which one to use’.”
There is very little regulation within the mhealth industry, particularly as the current role of the Food and Drug Administration regulates mobile apps only when they are provided in conjunction with a medical device. In order to assist with the functions of the FDA,
Happtique has been designed to provide a complementary service that evaluates an mhealth app in terms of its privacy, security, operability, and content, and issues its certification to those applications that meet its standards. Chodor explained that “We’ve created an objective process to evaluate whether an app does what it claims to do.”
