APP SPOTLIGHT: Happtique is world’s first health app superstore

Mobile health (also known as mHealth or telehealth) is a really wide term and can be anything from a doctor keeping track of your illness on an iPad, a new surveillance program to improve pregnancy care in developing countries or just a text message reminder to take your contraceptive pill in the morning from your local clinic. As most GPs and hospitals aren’t readily introducing this kind of mobile technology into our visits (just think how useful it’d be to get texts containing important results instead of letters you wait weeks for), what does the future hold for mHealth?

Well, a new health app superstore in the US called Happtique aims to provide all kinds of people with the mHealth solutions that they’re looking for. However, it’s not an app store like we know it, you can’t go on there and get an app to monitor your eating, check your blood pressure or add 500lbs to your face, Happtique is a little more advanced than that as it’s designed to allow healthcare professionals to create their own substores. To sign up you tell Happtique which area of medicine you work in and you can then set up an individually branded area to engage with patients, whether that’s keeping track of an illness, sending reminders or talking about symptoms.

Happtique has plenty of big plans for the future too, the company hopes to open a web-based version of its store, launch a number of substores, build an Android app catalogue and much more.

As consumers there’s little we can do with Happtique just yet, but it’s good to know that independent services and app stores exist to help medical professionals make the most of the mHealth technology that’s readily available to them. With so many problems with our health system, like long waiting times, over-worked doctors and breakdowns in communication, a quick injection of mobile technology might be just what we need to turn everything around again.