Developing and testing digital health apps: High effort, high cost?
SpaceX's deployment of reusable rockets have made space exploration more sustainable and cost-effective.
This principle of reusability is reflected in our (Hope For The Community “H4C”) digital platform, where the infrastructure supports a wide range of interventions that can be easily updated and (re)used to meet the different needs of stroke researchers, survivors, the NHS, charities and other third sector organisations.
The platform can host randomised controlled trials, toolkits, educational resources, or interventions that can be accessed anywhere in the world.
Digital health costs:
• £200K to build an app
• £10-20K annual maintenance
• 73% mean cost overrun for digital projects
The growth in multimorbidity emphasise the need for increased investment in developing and testing scaleable and innovative digital healthcare and support services. The emphasis should be on preventive measures and early interventions to mitigate the impact of these illnesses and enhance the overall quality of people's lives. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic generally, there has been a rapid and essential growth in the provision of digital health care for chronic conditions to allow remote care and patients are more motivated, accepting, and familiar with digital technologies for health care and social connection.
There are over 350,000 digital health apps available through the app store, with the overwhelming majority having no or low downloads and their technology is obsolete due to lack of investment. Many of these apps have been developed with research council funding. The NIHR advisory/review panels have been instructed to ensure that funding applications involving the development of websites, online tools and apps have a sustainability plan beyond the lifetime of the award.
Feedback on the funded ABI/stroke digital Self-management project confirms the benefits of using existing and repurposable tech sustainability.
“The existing digital platform, knowledge and expertise of creating digital self-management interventions is already available to the team which is a real strength of this application. This will mean less time will be spent on the actual creation of the digital platform.”
There are tens of thousands of mental health-related apps available today – representing extreme duplication in this digital age. A small number of digital healthcare teams have called for reducing Professor John Torous who leads the Division of Digital Psychiatry, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, has called for an end to the “extreme duplication” of digital health apps which result in huge inefficiencies”. He goes on further to say that “instead of a plethora of apps, there is a need for a few that meet the needs of many”.
Our platform can rapidly and cost- effectively reuse and repurpose health interventions This process massively improves efficiency, by avoiding the costly technological duplication of effort and resources when developing new digital apps.
The platform can be configured efficiently and cost-effectively to test and evaluate digital interventions to meet any behavioural and mental health support needs. The scope is limitless and includes long-term conditions, public health and corporate employee and student mental health in the UK and internationally.
H4C and Coventry University has supported 15 (to date) PhD students to develop and test a range of digital interventions in the UK and internationally.
