Medelinked, the global online and mobile health platform that empowers healthcare engagement and management, today launched the Medelinked Partner Development Program. The programme is designed to accelerate the global development and adoption of medical, wellness and fitness apps, devices and sensors by healthcare consumers and service providers.
The Medelinked Partner Development Program is based on the Medelinked Health Cloud that provides the infrastructure, including Open APIs and SDKs, for Medelinked partner, provider and pharma organisations to quickly build and deploy digital and mHealth apps and services.
It allows them to take advantage of Medelinked’s decade of experience in the mHealth marketplace and the ever-expanding Medelinked ecosystem of already connected wearables, healthcare and commercial applications.
In particular, it offers the ability for vendors to deliver as part of an open, integrated online and mHealth platform. In doing so supporting the complete patient journey along with other products, services and routes to market, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery in the context of the pressures that health delivery systems face currently.
Working with the Medelinked Partner Development Program
Gaining access to, and gaining from, the Medelinked Partner Development Programme is simple – sign up and become accepted for a developer account; select the open tools you want to use in your development; build and release your product and benefit from being an accredited developer engaging the global Medelinked ecosystem.
Apps, device, sensor and service vendors and healthcare provider and pharma organisations that already work with the Medelinked Health Platform worldwide include: Allscripts; Bioclinica; Bupa; Chat to a Doctor; FitBit; iHealth; MyDirectives; Saleforce; Samsung S Health; Symptom Checker and Withings.
The mHealth development challenge
Medelinked believes that the launch of the Medelinked Partner Development Programme is a crucial development given current conditions in the mHealth market and an essential step in mHealth development acceleration and risk reduction.
A recent independent study by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics* revealed that worldwide the number of mobile health apps has soared in the past two years, with more than 165,000 mHealth apps now available in the Apple iTunes and Android app stores. In the iTunes store alone there are more than 90,000 apps, about double the number listed in 2013.
The challenges for mHealth app developers, in particular, were highlighted when researchers used IMS Health’s proprietary AppScript Score database to review nearly 27,000 consumer mHealth apps that are available in the United States showing that, for instance
Just 12 per cent of mHealth apps account for 90 per cent of consumer downloads, and 36 apps generate nearly half of all downloads.40 per cent of apps have fewer than 5000 downloads.Nearly a quarter of consumer health apps are focused on disease treatment and management, whereas the remainder target fitness and wellness.Only ten percent of mHealth apps can connect to a device or sensor that provides physical function data.
Lack of integration holds back adoption
The majority of apps have a single purpose, whether that is information or instruction, the report points out. That has not changed in the past two years. Medelinked believes that lack of service integration is a major factor holding back app and device adoption by both consumers and healthcare professionals and so, ultimately, the delivery of digital healthcare services.
In particular, the report noted one of the major barriers to an expansion of mHealth prescribing is the lack of integration between mHealth device data and electronic health records, a capability only seen in only two per cent of apps. In contrast, the Medelinked Platform is already integrated with the Allscripts EHR – meeting a fundamental requirement for mHealth to achieve its full value in healthcare management.
Ian Gallifant, Medelinked CEO, says: “The proliferation of healthcare apps into the marketplace is proof of the desire for increasing effectiveness and efficiency in healthcare, but for most vendors the issue is difficulty in establishing value as a stand-alone app or device and getting cut through to the marketplace. The Medelinked Partner Development Programme and the healthcare ecosystem provided by the trusted Medelinked Health Platform is the answer to both these issues.”
