Diagnosing the future of medical apps

“It’s clear that there will be a continuing increase in the use of phone-based health and medical apps by consumers because this is the only kind of scalable tool that will be around for the foreseeable future,” says Bieke van Gorp, co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of FibriCheck. “While this could change in the longer term when new personal devices evolve, the reality is that today most people – including those over 50 for whom medical apps often bring the most value – have access to smartphones.”

It follows that such phone-based apps hold great potential for health insurers who want to get closer to their customers, says Van Gorp: 

FibriCheck is an app that can be used to detect or monitor an irregular heart rhythm. Users measure their heart rhythm by placing a finger on the camera of their smartphone. The UK’s National Health Service describes it as “the world’s first medically certified app that prevents strokes through the remote detection and monitoring of heart rhythm disorders, specifically atrial fibrillation.”

The FibriCheck company works with a range of healthcare insurers and mutual health benefit societies to offer FibriCheck subscription fee refunds to their customers. 

As Van Gorp goes on to point out, it’s important for insurers looking to engage with health apps to differentiate between those that offer genuinely valuable health measurements and ubiquitous wellness apps: “Just a small proportion of currently available health apps are actually medical apps,” she says. “To become an accredited medical app means being subject to a regular audit from an external body and providing peer-reviewed medical data.”

Clearly, it’s in any insurer’s interest to ensure that apps do what they claim to do, but consumers are becoming more savvy too. Van Gorp says FibriCheck is supporting the EU’s Label2Enable project, which promotes adoption of the international CEN-ISO/TS 82304-2 specification and its quality label for health and wellness apps.

The company also works with the UK-based Organisation for the Review of Care and Health Apps (ORCHA), which advises consumers on choosing safe digital health apps.

Apps are frequently associated with data harvesting but Van Gorp advises caution over data for use in underwriting or claims management, for example. “Insurers are generally realistic in this area because consumers are understandably concerned about the data they want to share with their insurers,” she says. “Not only are people today reluctant to share data, it’s also possible that some people will share their data selectively.”

That said, she does see great value in offering customers a premium discount if they use preventive healthcare apps consistently over time - irrespective of the outcome. 

Even more important, perhaps, is boosting customer satisfaction: “People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) symptoms are usually advised to monitor for arrhythmias, so for them, using a smartphone app means preventive treatment can be offered at the earliest opportunity,” she says. “Obtaining such hard, objective evidence that can be used to the insured’s advantage can only make them happier with their insurance and ultimately produce cost reductions on health systems.”

FibriCheck’s app is focused on heart health and atrial fibrillation but the company has plans to extend it into new diagnostic fields: “Over the past year, we have included symptom tracking and blood pressure monitoring, for example, and we keep exploring what value we can add in adjacent fields, such as COPD, diabetes (blood testing) and others.”

Regarding collaboration, Van Gorp observes that growing numbers of insurers want to add the FibriCheck functionality to their own apps: 

So what is the overall outlook for the evolution of medical apps? Van Gorp says the smartphone is the preferred platform for FibriCheck’s app – but in theory the signal it uses can come from another source, such as watches, in-ear devices or even mirrors: “The uptake for such devices compared with phones is very low – but who knows what the next big thing will be. Will the phones we use today still be around in 15 years?”