PUTTING THE USER AT THE CENTRE: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL HEALTH APPS

Eighty percent of health apps fail to deliver their intended impact. IfM PhD student Devmalya Sarkar tells us why he wants to help firms change this using better-directed and more-informed approaches to empathic digital health innovation.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a stark reminder of the increasing need for accessible, affordable and inclusive quality healthcare. However, escalating pressures to deliver more with less, rising health inequities, and the lure of direct-to-consumer offerings could soon render healthcare’s cost- and energy-intensive brick-and-mortar care environments and solution shop business models unsustainable. With this in mind, healthcare globally is exploring tools and tactics that can facilitate a better response.

User-centric digital health innovation

While digital health innovations such as health apps aren’t (yet) the utopian cure-all that they are often sensationalised to be, they can help. These innovations offer a range of possibilities across care access and delivery: immediate access to health services beyond physical locations, cost-effective data collection and processing, bespoke and targeted disease management, and health promotion support (exercise and nutrition advice, for example).

“Health apps and broader digital health interventions represent the lever with which to lift healthcare up from an outdated passive paradigm to one that engages and empowers users and other stakeholders,” says IfM PhD student Devmalya (Dev) Sarkar, a health-tech and digital-health innovation strategist.