Abstracts by keywords: mHealth
With digitalization in the healthcare system, great expectations are tied to increasing the quality of healthcare (Mathews et al., 2019), this particularly applies to diagnostics, prevention and the management of chronic diseases (Gordon, Landman, Zhang & Bates, 2020). Health and medicine apps (GuMA) are given a special role due to the ubiquitous availability of smartphones among the population. However, there has been a broad discussion for some time regarding the still limited evidence of GuMA, which is assessed as heterogeneous in various systematic reviews (Agarwal, Lefevre & Labrique, 2017; Felix et al., 2018; Mathews et al., 2019). In a systematic review by Bayambasuren et al. the authors searched for systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with prescribable GuMAs that were freely available for download (Byambasuren, Sanders, Beller & Glasziou, 2018). The authors define prescriptive apps as apps that are currently available, that are effective and that are used on their own (stand-alone) without the involvement of healthcare professionals. The authors included a total of six systematic reviews in their analysis, from which they in turn extracted 23 RCTs on 22 different GuMAs. Only 11 of these 23 RCTs demonstrated a meaningful effect on health or on selected surrogate endpoints that could possibly be attributed to GuMA. Overall, however, the evidence of effectiveness was of limited quality, which makes it much more difficult for doctors to prescribe these apps (Mathews et al., 2019). The authors also criticized a high risk of bias in both the six included systematic reviews and the 23 extracted RCTs, which also contributes to a limitation of the results. Likewise, positive results in terms of effectiveness can be found in various areas of application. This can be stated, for example, for the self-management of hypertension (Li, Liang, Bu & Hesketh, 2020) or the self-management of mental illnesses (Linardon, Cuijpers, Carlbring, Messer & Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, 2019).