HIMSS offers mobile medical apps assessment guide

A new resource released by the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) should help those interested in test-driving today’s burgeoning market of mobile medical applications.

“Selecting a Mobile App: Evaluating the Usability of Medical Applications,” produced by the mHIMSS App Usability Workgroup, is designed to assist small- to medium-sized facilities in evaluating mHealth applications for function, design and usability.

The free guide explains how to evaluate an application’s usability within different healthcare task scenarios, including verifying medication doseage and providing diabetic patient education. Several sample evaluation questionnaires are provided to help organization rank the apps being tested.

To date, most of the medical applications on the mobile platform have reference-based, primarily medical dictionaries, nutrition guides, weight calculators, and others. Now, more native and non-native apps are being developed for managing chronic diseases and medications, storing and sharing personal health information, honing cognition and acting as a user interface to an electronic health record system, the guide notes.

The guide is available as a free PDF download (less than 1 MB).

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