Comparative Study of Medical Reference and Information Mobile Apps for Healthcare Professionals and Students

This paper presents a framework upon which medical applications can be evaluated both in terms of basic functionality, and their target area of users. The study was conducted on 40 mobile applications that were published within Google Play and Apple App store targeted for clinicians, medical practitioners and students. It was important to first classify the mobile apps selected because there are many generic applications, and some focus on special areas within the medical field. The classification process included determining the specialist areas of these applications such as educational and training, nursing, diagnosis and treatment, patient monitoring, testing and laboratories, and social networking. After the classification, a criterion to evaluate applications within individual categories, as well as in more general aspects such as their performance, security, user interface, and other software quality attributes, was developed. Test data was used to test the applications using the developed evaluation criteria, and the results were then used to determine the apps with surpassing features. As per the category-wise results, Medicine References and Education & Training categories had applications that had better scores than other categories. However, an equally important finding concluded that there are not enough applications to help with lab testing, and this gap needs to be filled. Most applications lacked the usability aspect and needed work in user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) areas.