Cleveland Clinic has created an internal committee of doctors, executives and IT experts tasked with developing ideas for medical mobile apps.
Sensing a big market opportunity as the number of mobile users only continues to climb, the Clinic is encouraging all staffers to share their best ideas for mobile apps, Fierce Mobile Healthcare reported.
The new “governance committee” will then vet those ideas and decide which ones should be developed into mobile applications, according to Scott Linabarger, the Clinic’s director of Internet marketing. Linabarger spoke last week at the World Congress Leadership Summit on mHealth.
The group will also help locate funding to develop prospective apps and assist with the development process, according to the report.
The Clinic already has several apps under development, including medical apps for patients that deliver a consumer-oriented health news app for the iPad with videos, a physician app that will deliver the Clinic’s clinical content to doctors around the United States, and a sleep app from the Clinic’s Wellness Institute.
A Cleveland Clinic spokeswoman didn’t respond to an e-mail.
The move by the Clinic to set up a formal group charged with app development comes more than a year-and-a-half after a top national rival took a similar step. In January 2010, Mayo Clinic announced that it partnered with a developer to form a new company to create apps based on Mayo research. Mayo has released apps for meditation, insomnia and weight loss in Apple’s App Store.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Last year, Cleveland Clinic launched a free wellness app called “Let’s Move It!”
The mobile health market is estimated to be worth $2.1 billion in 2011, according to a recent study from market research and analysis company RNCOS. More impressive is the market’s growth, estimated to register at a whopping 22 percent compound annual growth rate over the next several years, according to RNCOS.
In April 2010, Cleveland Clinic launched a mobile version of its website that Linabarger said generated only a “mild amount” of traffic. Linabarger said the problem was that the mobile site didn’t include the plethora of clinical information found on the hospital’s traditional site. The Clinic is currently adding that information to its mobile site.
