Back to the Future of Mobile Health Apps with Professor SYRUM's Nephew

There is no more cherished and insulting image of a scientist/researcher than the "mad scientist" persona often depicted in cartoons.

A case in point is "Professor SYRUM" from Boehringer's EU-only Facebook game of the same name (see "Happy Holidays from Professor Syrum"). That's him on the near left.

Recently, I became acquainted with an unnamed scientist (physician? pharmacist?) in an animated piece produced by IMS Health to promote its new mobile health app review program (see "Is IMS Health's Mobile Health App 'Certification' Program Doomed to #FAIL?"). That's him on the far left of the image shown above. Let's call him "Doctor IMS."

Do you see the similarities between Professor SYRUM and Doctor IMS? Read on to learn my theory about how they are related.

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Is IMS Health's Mobile Health App "Certification" Program Doomed to #FAIL?

"Welcome to the wild, wild, west of mobile health apps," says the voice over of an IMS Health animated Youtube video (embedded at the end of this post) that promotes two new mobile health app services:

AppScript - "a secure, cloud-hosted mobile health prescribing solution that helps providers create custom app formularies to prescribe, reconcile and track mobile medical apps"; and 

AppNucleus - "the industry’s most secure app development and hosting platform that offers a flexible, cloud-based publishing platform and pre-built secure messaging, personal health record/wallet and survey tools."

Recall (here) that the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics published a report that included an analysis of about 10,000 apps among the 40,000+ healthcare apps available for download from the U.S. Apple iTunes app store and an assessment of the potential value they provide throughout a patient's journey. The assessment found that "healthcare apps available today have both limited and simple functionality... [and] do little more than provide information."

Obviously, there is a lot of room for the improvement of mobile health apps. I've written about this many times as it relates to the pharmaceutical industry (see, for example, Reigning in the "Wild West" of Mobile Health Apps and A Formula for Patient-Centric mHealth Apps).

Let's just focus on AppScript, which promises to "classify and evaluate more than 40,000 mobile healthcare apps currently available for download on iOS and Android platforms." I have some reservations about how successful this "Software-as-a-Service"/certification program will be.

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