The Sorry State of Pharma mHealth Apps - Pharma Marketing Network

April 2014 Vol. 13, No. 4

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The Sorry State of Pharma Mobile Health Apps Lack of Security, Continuity and Platform Standardization, Distribution Challenges, Poor ROI Author: John Mack

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Vol. 13, No. 4: April 2014

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t a recent eyeforpharma Philadelphia 2014 Summit, Carolyn Gauntlett, Senior Innovation Consultant with IMS Health, gave an interesting presentation titled “How to Make Sure You’re Getting the Most Out of Your mHealth App Development.” This articles summarizes some major points made in that presentation as well as data from the report "Patient Apps for Improved Healthcare: From Novelty to Mainstream" published by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Some Docs Prescribe More Apps Than Pills Gauntlett claimed her organization has seen “great enthusiasm” for mHealth apps from physicians. “You have very progressive physicians like Eric Topol who said he prescribes more apps than pills,” said Gauntlett (see “More Apps, Less Meds?).

Carolyn Gauntlett

A recent European mHealth green paper published on 10 April 2014 noted the role that mobile apps can play in the shift towards patient-centric care.

“Healthcare systems will have to open up to the possibility of receiving data from patients (e.g. collected by mobile apps) and ensuring ubiquitous access to care through online health systems accessible by patients and doctors,” said the Commission. “This implies a change in the role of professionals who may have to remotely monitor patients and more often interact with them via e-mails.” According to Gauntlett, ALL pharma stakeholders— not just physicians—are ready for apps: • Policymakers acknowledge benefits • FDA released draft guidelines • Payers are beginning to reimburse apps

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health apps and only a small minority of consumer apps target specific conditions (see Figure 1, page 2). "The majority do little more than provide information." “At the moment,” said Gauntlett, “we have a profusion of healthcare apps with undocumented efficacy and basically existing in a vacuum of scientific evidence” (read, for example, “Some Unregulated Physician Smartphone Apps May Be Buggy”; http://bit.ly/pgdaily103113-2). “Less than 2,000 apps target therapy areas of specific conditions,” noted Gauntlett. “So there’s still an unmet need from an app development perspective for the pharmaceutical industry,” said Gauntlett. Continues…

More Apps, Less Meds? (Source: http://bit.ly/1jqE7k3)

In a segment called “iDoctor,” Snyderman, NBC News’s chief medical editor, called Topol the “foremost expert in the explodeing field of wireless medicine,” and Topol has been an unabashed supporter of wireless technologies, even as others have dropped the label. Topol, a cardiologist, told Snyderman, that billions of dollars are wasted every year for screening and unnecessary medications because people are “being treated like a cattle herd” in the frantic fee-for-service, litigation-happy world. “Medicine today is about as wasteful as one can imagine,” he said. Topol expressed the view that a third of drugs prescribed are “total waste” and mass screenings represent “medicine dumbed down” by treating everyone the same.

So, Why Hasn’t Mobile Health “Exploded?” “Given this much positivity from stakeholders, why aren’t we there yet?” asked Gauntlett..

Topol, who left the Cleveland Clinic after ruffling too many feathers by repeatedly questioning authority, helped get COX-2 inhibitor Vioxx pulled from the market in 2004 for safety reasons. In fact, he has long complained about overuse of prescription drugs.

"An assessment finds that healthcare apps available today have both limited and simple functionality," say the authors of the IMS report. Only half are genuine

“These days I’m actually prescribing a lot more apps than I am medications,” he told Snyderman.

• Physicians recognize the potential and many are recommending apps to their patients • Patients believe apps will improve healthcare

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Few mHealth Apps Are Worthy In her presentation Guantlett reviewed data from the analysis of 44,000 healthcare apps available for download from the U.S. Apple iTunes app store and summarized an assessment of the potential value they provide throughout a patient's journey. This was part of the report mentioned above IMS did a “deep dive” into the “genuine” patientfocused apps. Each one was given a "functionality score" based on 25 criteria, which include the type and quantity of information provided by the app, how the app tracks or captures user data, etc. So, how did the apps do, functionality-wise? See the chart below:

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Not very good. This is not even a "normal distribution" in which scores would tend to group around a central value with no bias left or right. The curve has a strong bias to the left—low score—region. In fact, more than 90% of the over 16,000 consumer health apps studied received a score of 40 or less. Looking on the bright side, 1,600 apps scored between 40 and 80. Given this analysis, Gauntlett said “it’s no surprise that most healthcare apps today have very low download rates.” IMS noted "a significant skew in download volume for healthcare apps, with more than 50% of available apps achieving fewer than 500 downloads. Conversely, of over 33,000 apps studied, 5 apps account for 15% of all downloads in the healthcare category." This implies that the distribution of mHealth apps is a challenge. The Pharm App Black Hole While the pharmaceutical industry seems committed to app development and patient engagement, Gauntlett remarked that pharma apps today are simplistic, one-way. non-engaging, and essentially marketing tools. “Today most pharma apps do very little more than provide information or allow basic symptom tracking,” said Gauntlett. Continues…

Figure 1. A Sliver of 44,000 Health Apps Are Truly Useful for Patients. Source: IMS Health


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Over 70 pharma/biotech companies have apps for patients and healthcare professionals. The majority of these (55%) focus on basic symptom tracking, 35% on disease information, and the remainder on charts and reporting. Gauntlett identified three key “Pharma App Problems”: 1. Lack of a Global Technology Platform – many apps are launched regionally and locally with different technology parrtners, design and creation agencies, translation services, which results in inconsistency in design and lack of continuity. 2. Limited Control of Security and HIPAA Compliance – “as a result of that,” said Gauntlet, “any ambitious app designs are being stuck down by internal medica/legal reviews because of concerns about the storage and use of healthcare data.” 3. Distribution as mentioned above Poor ROI The biggest pharma app problem is actually a result of the three problems just mentioned: lack of return


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on investment. Gauntlett pointed out that an analysis of over 150 mobile apps released by a SINGLE top 10 global pharma company reveals that these apps may have cost the company $40 million to develop but they generated less that 1000 downloads per app (most got “significantly less” than 1,000 downloads). That’s more than $250 and perhaps as much as $500 per download! Since more than 70 companies have developed apps (some have developed hundreds of apps), this problem could mean that the top 20 global pharma companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars that’s gone into a “black hole.” “And we hear that pharmaceutical reps are actually using precious time with physicians to detail these apps as well as their actual products,” Gauntlett said incredulously. It’s time to transform the approach!! For more on that, stay tuned for an upcoming Pharma Marketing Talk Internet radio show where PharmaGuy will interview Gauntlett to get her perspective on the needed transformation. Pharma Marketing News

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