Dive Brief:
- Digital health tools, from apps to wearable sensors, are proliferating rapidly, according to a new report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (formerly the QuintilesIMS Institute). Top app stores now list nearly 320,000 health apps, almost double that of two years ago.
- About two-fifths of apps focus on health condition management rather than simply "wellness," notes the report. The top 41 most popular apps, however, account for most downloads, with 85% of health apps counting fewer than 5,000 downloads to their name.
- Wearables are also increasing in number: over 340 consumer wearable devices are on the market, backed up by 571 published efficacy studies. More than half of apps use sensor data, mostly for activity tracking but increasingly for monitoring vital signs, too.
Dive Insight:
Apps and wearables range from smartphone-based wellness tools used by people to track activity to complex devices that enable healthcare providers to monitor symptoms and vital signs. The former help people to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle, while the latter can support patients through self-care, potentially reducing clinic visits or helping to boost independence.
"At this time, there is at least one high-quality app for each step of the patient journey," the report authors conclude.
The impact of these technologies isn't just limited to patients, though. According to the findings, use of digital health tools in five key areas — diabetes prevention, diabetes care, asthma, cardiac rehabilitation and pulmonary rehabilitation — could save roughly $7 billion a year in U.S. healthcare spending, equivalent to 1.4% of total expenditures.
The next step may be the creation of digital biomarkers, which are algorithms built on top of wearable activity monitors. These could correlate with disease activity in the same way as molecular biomarkers, helping stratify patients by their symptoms in personalized medicine. They could also play a role as surrogate markers in clinical trials, or in expanding the accuracy and role of remote medicine.
Importantly, there is at last a growing body of clinical evidence, including randomized controlled trials, that back up the use of digital tools. This evidence is strongest in diabetes, depression and anxiety.
Continued growth of evidence could mean such tools begin to find mention in clinical guidelines or be adopted by payers and providers.
Currently, nearly 900 clinical trials are ongoing that use digital health tools, most of which are sponsored by patient care institutions rather than pharmaceutical or medtech companies.
"Although analyses of the Digital Health landscape published by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics in 2013 and 2015 found evidence still to be scarce and the value of digital health difficult to measure, this has now changed and the benefits to patients are becoming clearer," writes Murray Aitken, head of the IQVIA Institute. "Efforts to incorporate these tools into practice are underway."
What isn't yet clear is how often these apps are used following download, and how long they remain useful — a type of "digital adherence" problem. Many downloaded apps are likely to be used just a handful of times, collecting (metaphorical) dust on a smartphone's home screen.