Via CNN Money:
FORTUNE -- A few weeks ago I wrote a column for the magazine about how most health apps don't work very well, aren't reaching those most in need, and -- besides -- counter to all claims that technology will save health care, several proven solutions involve real people, interacting with other real people, in real life. My goal was to call B.S. on what I find to be an all-too-pervasive Valley-ism: that smartphone software that tracks steps or helps photograph food or replaces your doctors visit will revolutionize medicine and change the world. No. For the most part, health apps are selling to the least needy but most willing buyers: rich people who care about being healthy. My colleague Dan Primack, who is out in the Bay Area this week, calls it "a particularly insular narcissism" in Silicon Valley, which seems exactly right.
But to every rule there is an exception, and glad I was to be called out (and called up) by the founder and CEO of one mobile-health company whose entire premise is based on scientific research with repeatable results -- the exact study, in fact, I had used as my example of what works better than a health app. Omada Health's first product, called Prevent, is essentially an online version of the Diabetes Prevention Program, which grew out of an NIH study proving the most effective means of staving off diabetes is rigorous lifestyle intervention, overseen by health coaches.
Read more: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/10/03/a-health-app-based-on-real-research/
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