Today Anne Zieger wrote a blog post arguing that there are too many healthcare apps. It’s a really interesting take on the plethora of healthcare apps out there and the need for there to be apps that handle more than one specific condition or measurement. Anne argues that patients don’t want to open a whole bunch of different apps to manage their health. Plus, she points out that the highest cost patients are often chronic patients whose health needs to be managed across multiple diseases and multiple data points.
While I find Anne’s analysis interesting, I’m prone to think that we actually need more healthcare apps. I say that because I don’t think the current crop of healthcare apps are really moving the needle. So, we need more healthcare apps that actually attack the right problems. Piggybacking Anne’s comments, I’m not sure the current crop of apps are going to scale to the complexity of a patient, so we likely need new healthcare apps that work with that complexity in mind.
The reality I’ve seen with most healthcare apps is that they lack ambition. Can you name a healthcare app that illustrates the ambition to improve the health of a patient and lowers the cost of healthcare as we know it? Those are big claims to make and so you don’t see anyone claiming it. Claims aside, are there any companies that are really doing it?
My experience shows that there are a few apps that in a very limited scope are able to improve the health of the patient. Although, very very few of them have done the studies necessary to be able to claim that. They have plenty of anecdotal stories about how their app improved someone’s life. However, they don’t yet have the data to prove what they believe their app is able to accomplish.
It’s going to take a lot more ambition from healthcare app developers to really attach the problems that vex healthcare. Keeping someone healthy is an extremely complex issue and won’t likely be solved by a 99 cent app.
If that’s too big of a vision for you as an entrepreneur, how about you start with a simpler concept. Show me an app that changes people’s behavior. Let’s start with something that simple and scale from there. Most health apps aren’t even brave enough to take on that challenge. I’m not blaming them. It’s hard, but that’s what will make it so valuable.
