There's an App for That? Highlighting the Difficulty in Finding Clinically Relevant Smartphone Applications

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Mobile Health Technology
• Emergency Medicine

Background:

• Physicians increasingly use mobile devices for clinical decision-making and accessing medical information.
• The iTunes App Store's
• Medical
• category contains numerous apps, but lacks strict criteria for clinical relevance.
• Identifying useful medical applications for healthcare professionals can be challenging.

Purpose of the Study:

• To quantify the characteristics of medical applications in the iTunes App Store relevant to emergency physicians, residents, and medical students.
• To assess the proportion of clinically relevant emergency medicine applications within the broader App Store.
• To evaluate the usability and accessibility of mobile health resources for medical professionals.

Main Methods:

• Searched the iTunes App Store for emergency medicine (EM) related terms (e.g.,
• emergency medicine
• ,
• critical care
• ).
• Two physicians independently categorized applications (Clinically Relevant, Book/Published Source, Non-English, Study Tools, Not Relevant).
• A third physician resolved categorization disagreements; descriptive statistics were calculated.

Main Results:

• A total of 7,699 apps were identified from 21 search terms.
• Only 17.8% of these apps were deemed clinical, with 6.9% within the
• Medical
• category and 0.1% of the overall App Store.
• A significant majority (64.9%) were not relevant to medical professionals.

Conclusions:

• Clinically relevant medical apps constitute a small fraction of the App Store's medical content.
• A structured approach is needed to effectively identify valuable medical applications.
• National emergency medicine associations should consider curating mobile resources for their members.