The Hacking Medicine Institute today announced RANKED Health, a program to critically evaluate and rank health-focused applications and connected devices.
Healthcare focused mobile applications make lots of promises. They promise help physicians monitor patients with real-time data, resulting in better outcomes and lower costs. They promise to provide treatment to patients in low resource settings with limited access to healthcare professionals. They promise to help you track your sleep, steps and symptoms, and take your medicine on time.
The issue of data privacy on mobile phones has been brought to public and judicial debate again with Apple’s refusal to create a backdoor into its operating systems. The debates so far have failed to highlight that granting governments access to mobile phone data opens access to not only sensitive financial and personal information, but also the crown jewels of healthcare: patient health records. Now that the majority of patients and doctors are accessing, storing, and transmitting healthcare information via mobile phones and connected medical devices, smartphone security has become a lynchpin of patient data security.
A nonprofit institute, spun off from the healthcare entrepreneurship program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will soon start producing consumer reviews of mobile apps and other digital health tools that have been vetted by Harvard University clinicians, the nonprofit’s co-founder said.
Set to launch in early December, these will consist of a consumer-focused list of the best apps, connected medical devices and technology-enabled services that are reviewed by Harvard physicians as well as by technical experts from MIT’s Hacking Medicine Institute.
“None of the clinical institutes are willing to take that institutional risk to say, ‘These are the best’ and to say, actually, [that] ‘these are unsafe at any speed.’ But the Hacking Medicine Institute is a group of hackers, and we can take that risk,” said Zen Chu, a co-founder of the organization, which launched this past June.
The initial list will include a preliminary batch of what the institute considers the best apps, connected medical devices, telemedicine and websites for preventing and managing disease as well as for finding care. Regular updates to the list are planned throughout the year.
Health apps, reportedly numbering in the tens of thousands, vary widely in content and quality. The institute wants to “cut through the noise and the hype,” said Chu, who is also a senior lecturer in healthcare innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and an entrepreneur-in-residence at the university.
