Healthcare is sitting on a gold mine. Providers, patients, and other stakeholders could benefit greatly from apps that coordinate care, analyze costs, detect errors, and more.
But as Chilmark Research points out in a new report, a variety of hurdles has kept app developers out of the healthcare realm and prevented dedicated health app stores from forming or growing.
“Healthcare’s financial incentives cause organizations to hoard, monetize, or closely control the use of data under their dominion,” the report says. If a healthcare app becomes widely used, it could cut into the healthcare organizations’ profit margins.
Electronic health record (EHR) vendors, meanwhile, are both friend and foe, the report says. On one hand, they operate the largest health app stores currently in existence. Athenahealth and Allscripts offer 214 and 200 apps in their app stores, respectively.
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Those two app stores are, by far, the largest. Epic’s app store is third largest among EHR vendors, and it only offers 73 apps. Cerner’s store has 21. But like healthcare organizations, they lack the financial incentives to do anything too daring or recruit third-party developers.
EHRs work to ensure that healthcare organizations are "identifying and documenting every conceivable charge and seeing as many patients as possible … which [they] regard as indispensable to their existence," according to Brian Murphy, Chilmark's director of research.
Healthcare organizations and EHR vendors work in close contact with one another to deliver “controlled and non-disruptive” technologies, the report says. Vendors effectively have a “mini-monopoly on workflow and data,” it adds, so they will continue to dominate healthcare app stores “for the foreseeable future.”
But healthcare needs a disruption. Existing apps do not use modern APIs, engage with patients effectively, or adapt to needs that change over time, the report says. They can also be difficult to navigate, findings that experts from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Medical Association, and MedStar Health attributed to poor testing last week.
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This makes life more difficult for clinicians, Murphy says.
"Physicians and nurses feel like they struggle to deliver care because EHRs push them to spend time entering data and interacting with patients unproductively," Murphy told FierceHealthcare. "In an ideal world, apps will help clinicians deliver care rather than justify charges."
To create more opportunities for healthcare app development, the authors recommended that healthcare organizations closely evaluate how apps could impact their operations. However, they warned smaller developers against assuming apps they develop could make a splash since most healthcare organizations will heed their EHR vendor’s advice. And it’s not likely that healthcare apps will really take off anytime soon on consumer-facing app sources, like Apple’s App Store and Google Play for Android.
Given the demand and potential of healthcare apps, stakeholders should consider setting aside their concerns about short-term financial setbacks, the report suggests. Healthcare apps may be stuck in a rut right now, but there is room to capitalize on this opportunity. Whoever takes advantage of the opportunity to fix them could strike it rich.