Doctors Rate the 100 Best Health Apps

What health apps do doctors actually recommend? That's what a new report from telehealth platform HealthTap sought to uncover, in categories from weight loss and women's health to heart health and aerobics.

HealthTap requested app recommendations from more than 65,000 doctors on iOS and Android based on three criteria: medical soundness of the app, the app's utility (in supporting health or healthy living goals), and the app's usability.

The report used doctors' recommendations from HealthTap to rank the top 100 health apps, separately for Android and iOS, as well as find the top apps in 30 specific health categories. According to the company, it is the first and only comprehensive ranking of health apps based on the professional recommendations by independent, leading U.S. doctors.

The top five apps for Android and iOS shared plenty of overlap and were:

Android

• Weight Watchers
• White Noise Light
• Lose It!
• First Aid by American Red Cross
• RunKeeper

iOS

• MyFitnessPal
• Weight Watchers
• Lose It!
• White Noise Lite
• First Aid by American Red Cross

Mobile apps for health are an increasingly popular and important category, as consumers look for anytime-anywhere guidance to keep them well. But because most of these apps aren't regulated, and many do not offer actual medical information, consumers don't have a lot of clarity about which apps are worth using.

"We've received a significant amount of feedback from our users, telling us that they're confused by the deluge of app choices available to them," said HealthTap founder and CEO Ron Gutman. "Doctors too told us they'd like to learn which apps their peers recommended. In response to these requests, we decided to bring together the best doctors in the U.S. from our network and beyond to help organize and identify the best apps available today to both consumers and doctors."

How Doctors Surveyed the Apps
Doctors were able to recommend each app only once, meaning the number of recommends an app received represents the number of independent doctors who publicly recommended that app. The Annual Top Health and Medical App Report is based entirely on doctor recommendations, and apps appear in the report based on the total number of doctor reviews and recommendations.

All apps classified as "Health & Wellness" and "Medical" in the Apple App Store and on Google Play qualified for review. To carry out the survey, HealthTap first asked doctors to divide apps into two piles: those used by physicians in their practices, and those that are more beneficial to consumers. The doctors then divided the latter group into 30 categories, including calorie counters, period trackers, diabetes logs, medication reminders, and pregnancy apps.

Next, HealthTap invited all U.S.-licensed doctors in good standing to recommend apps. HealthTap itself contains a network of doctors who must undergo verification to be a part of the platform. Verified doctors, more than 65,000 of them, were granted access to a special dashboard where they could find, download, try, and review all health and medical apps. They were then provided with criteria to assess the apps, such as medical accuracy, validity and soundness, effectiveness, and ease of use.

As a doctor reviewed an app, similar apps automatically appeared alongside it. When doctors frequently recommended specific apps, these apps would appear more often for other doctors to consider, and the more doctors declined to recommend specific apps, the less often they would appear.

To see the complete list of apps across all categories, download the free AppRx iOS and Android reports.