Quality and Safety of Health Mobile Applications: Are They an Issue?

mHealth is a huge market that provides users the opportunity to have better health and healthcare quality. Health apps support citizen’s empowerment through self-management, health promotion, disease prevention, providing personalized health advice and care. However, the rapid development of the mHealth sector raises concerns about the potential risk of health functions apps providing transmission of health data, the capture of these data via sensors, self-diagnoses, disease management or diagnosis and appropriate processing of the data collected. Since mHealth solutions and devices can collect large quantities of personal information, including personal health information, they can process them as well.The mHONcode is a set of ethical, honesty, transparency, quality, and security standards covering various aspects of health apps, including the disclosure of the qualifications of the authors, the funding sources, references, when the content was created and last updated, what the privacy policy is, and how data is stored and transmitted over the internet. The mHONcode motivates health apps editors to be transparent in the production process and in the way to use user’s data. The commitment of a health information provider to implement or comply with the HON code of conduct for health apps is shown by the displaying of a quality label (logo or HONcode seal) on the website.As the adaptation of an already proven trustworthy code of conduct of health websites (the HONcode), the mHONcode is well placed to provide guidance for the next generation of health information providers—mobile apps in this case.KeywordsAppsmHealthTrustworthinessCertificationQuality