App fever at Mobile Health 2011

This year’s attendance was double last year’s at the Mobile Health conference, held at Stanford University May 4-5, 2011. The main theme last year was monetizing mobile health apps, without any real ideas of how to do so. This year the main theme was app fever – everyone either having or thinking that they need to have an app. No one seemed to be immune - large and small health service providers, physician groups, insurers, and entrepreneurs alike are scrambling to launch apps.

Rather than having each organization struggle through multi-platform app development,

what is needed is the GeoCities of mobile apps,

a plug and play platform where app creators can select different widgets for app customization. The most obvious mobile health app widgets would be for appointment scheduling, prescription management, lab test results, physician interaction, and EMRs.

Since app fever reaches far beyond the health sector, GeoCities/Dreamweaver-level platforms, much more accessible to the layperson than Google App Inventor and unified mobile code base tools, could cause even greater activity in the already booming mobile sector.