UPFRONT | Roundup TECHNOLOGY Take 5 Smart phone health apps not always so smart: study NEW YORK – Don’t count on smartphone health apps in an emergency. A review shows many don’t warn when you’re in danger. The study published in the journal Health Affairs found problems even with apps considered to be among the highest-quality offerings on the market. There’s been a prolifera-tion of health apps for mo-bile phones. According to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, there are more than 165,000 health apps out there. “The state of health apps is even worse than we thought,” said Dr. James Madara, chief executive of the American Medical Asso-ciation, who was not in-volved in the study. This wasn’t a survey of step-counting fitness apps. The research team reviewed 137 apps designed for pa-tients with serious ongoing health problems, including asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and depres-sion. The health apps, for ex-ample, help those with dia-betes track and record every blood sugar reading and in-sulin injection. One invites users to photograph their moles, and offers analysis on whether they are changing in a way that signals skin can-cer. The study suggests that, though some apps are good, there are problems. Perhaps most concerning was what happened when doctor reviewers entered information that should have drawn warnings from the app – like selecting “yes” when the app asked if the user was feeling suicidal, or entering extremely abnor-mal levels for blood sugar levels. Only 28 of 121 apps re-sponded appropriately to such red-flag information, researchers said. Health apps “should have some common-sense stand-ards,” said lead author Dr. Karandeep Singh, a Univer-sity of Michigan internist. “The vast majority of apps do not have any kind of re-sponse.” Another issue is the safe-guarding of medical privacy. While patients commonly enter health information into apps, a lot of the infor-mation is shared through insecure methods like text message or emailing, the researchers said. The reviewed apps came from Apple iTunes and Google Play app stores – most of them free. Each app was reviewed by a doctor and a tech expert. The re-searchers named most of the apps but didn’t publish their reviews. Instead, they shared them with the app compa-nies. Singh said they were inter-ested in “identifying gaps that need to be filled” in-stead of naming winners and losers. Overall, the industry needs to do more work to improve safety and privacy, he said. And patients need to go beyond consumer ratings on websites before depend-ing on apps to make crucial decisions about their health. – Mike Stobbe, The Associated Press NUMBER CRUNCHING Opioid abuse The number of deaths related to opioid abuse in Canada is increasing at an alarming rate. National data on this growing crisis is scarce but here are some facts. 4,800 Hospital admissions related to opioid poisoning between 2014 and 2015 14.9 percentage of Canadians that use opioid as pain reliever Average length of opioid-related hospital stay 15% to 29% Canadians living with chronic pain www.canadianchiropractor.ca 8 Canadian Chiropractor February 2017 Illustration: Brian Fray 8 days
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