Quality Assessment of Health-apps using a Public Agency Quality and Safety Seal. The Appsaludable Case

Abstract

Standards and validation practices regarding mobile health apps need to be established to ensure their proper use and integration into medical practice. This paper proposes an innovative and integrative approach to examine and compare the quality of a certified health mobile applications set. A double classification framework (verified and perceived quality) is proposed and validated to evaluate the quality of 22 verified health mobile apps, particularly to understand whether these apps provide the service demanded by its users. Evaluation of verified quality was based on a certification public program. To analysis user satisfaction, we used content analysis to examine and extract words and expressions contained in online reviews (1,574 reviews were analyzed). The R language was used to scrape data and to perform all statistical analyses. The results did not confirm a significant relationship between both classifications (p > .05). However, the requirements with the highest degree of compliance ("design and relevance" and "quality and safety") of the app accreditation program were the best rated by the users of the apps in their comments. Reflections derived from this paper represent an important contribution to the knowledge base in the expanding research area of mobile health.