Mobile health is taking off but what’s still in its way?

First, the good news: a growing class of mobile health apps are helping people do everything from lose weight to manage diabetes to chat and talk with doctors in real time.

Investment in the sector is expected to increase by 25 percent for the next five years and, according to Chilmark Research, it could exceed $1.1 billion by 2017. But healthcare innovation experts say the vast majority of mobile apps fail to engage consumers and the category as a whole has yet to win over doctors. “Most of these apps are actually awful. There may be 12,000 apps out there but they’re not 12,000 good apps,” Chris Wasden, Global Healthcare Innovation Leader for PwC, said at the MedCity Converge health tech conference. “They’re mostly bad apps that people rarely use.” Wasden said effective apps reflect six principles – interoperability, integration (with doctors’ workflows and patients’ lives), intelligence, outcomes, socialization and engagement – but very few actually do that. Aside from the issues with the apps themselves, he said recent research conducted by PwC found that even though patients are eager to adopt mobile health, doctors and the larger system surrounding them are reluctant to change things up.