More than 165,000 mobile health apps are now available to consumers, according to a report published by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. 

The IMS Institute study, Patient Adoption of mHealth: Use, Evidence and Remaining Barriers to Mainstream Acceptance, found that one in 10 apps has the capability to connect to a device or sensor, providing biofeedback and physiological function data from the patient and greatly extending the accuracy and convenience of data collection. Nearly a quarter of consumer apps are now focused on disease and treatment management, while two-thirds target fitness and wellness, according to the report.

Having so many apps to choose from can be overwhelming for consumers—40 percent of apps have fewer than 5,000 downloads, according to the report. Just 12 percent of mHealth apps account for more than 90 percent of all consumer downloads, with nearly half of all downloads generated by just 36 apps.

“While much progress has been made over the past two years, mHealth apps are still far from being a fully integrated component of healthcare delivery,” said Murray Aitken, executive director of the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. “Healthcare providers are actively addressing the remaining barriers. These include developing and adopting trusted platforms for ongoing apps curation and evaluation, creating practical reimbursement models and ensuring true interoperability within and across healthcare systems.”

The report also found that app connectivity is a major focus for developers. During the past two years the percentage of mHealth apps with the capability to connect to social networks increased from 26 percent to 34 percent, underscoring the importance of social networking in consumer engagement. Less progress has been made in enabling apps to connect and communicate with provider healthcare systems—a fundamental requirement for mHealth to realize its full value in healthcare management.

Most research to date focuses on app usage rather than effectiveness but momentum is building for observational studies and randomized clinical trials to gather evidence to support the value of apps, specifically in the areas of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and mental health. The number of clinical trials using mobile apps has more than doubled in the past two years, rising from 135 to 300.

The majority of healthcare providers interviewed by the IMS Institute are confident that mHealth can improve overall outcomes, reduce the cost of healthcare and encourage patients to take a more active role in improving their health. Providers emphasized that mHealth data integrated with EHRs is critical to better clinical decision making and patient communication.

Providers urged stakeholders to actively address remaining barriers, including: limited connectivity and integration into workflow systems; a slow paradigm shift in reimbursement processes and delivery of care; data confidentiality, privacy, security and regulatory uncertainties; lack of scientific evidence to measure the efficacy of apps; and the inability to reach the most vulnerable cohorts of patients—mainly the elderly or non-English speaking.