Happtique Halts Mobile Health App Certification

We’ve written a number of articles over the years about Happtique. Much like I railed against the meaningless CCHIT certification, I felt that Happtique was the same as CCHIT but for mobile health. I was partially comforted by the criteria that came out because they were so general and broad. They were still meaningless, but I felt they could have been much worse. Either way, I don’t think a certification has any value when it comes to mHealth. They don’t know how or can’t measure the right things.

As the tweet above mentions, Happtique as halted their app certification after a developer revealed a number of major security holes in 2 of the Happtique certified apps.

The blog posts on the developer site are well worth the read. The thing that stood out to me was how the security issues were very simple security practices. It wasn’t like the developer used some complex hack to find the security holes. The passwords were stored in plain text. I mean really? They didn’t use any encryption in transit. Amazing!

Of course all this reminds me of all the HIPAA breaches we hear about where a laptop wasn’t encrypted. There are at least a few things in healthcare that should be considered no brainer decisions. Encryption is one of them.

Hopefully a number of good things will come out of this situation. First, people won’t trust a mobile health certification. Second, mobile health developers will see that they need to take security and privacy more seriously.

I created a little poll for you to share your thoughts on mobile health app certifications. Plus, feel free to pontificate in the comments.

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December 20, 2013 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Mobile Health Security
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Happtique Unveils Find Draft of Certification Standards

Because I’ve covered Happtique a few times in the past, I thought I would do a brief update on the latest from the company.

Happtique announced on February 27th that the final draft of the app certification standards are completed. They can be viewed here. The standards fall into four categories that mHealth apps will be evaluated and certified against. These cateogires are operability, privacy, security and content. While the company isn’t yet accepting apps to be certified, app creators can expect to pay between $2,500 and $3,000 to have their app reviewed.

Fierce Mobile Healthcare reported that Ben Chodor, CEO of Happtique, told them that the mHealth market is a “Wiild West” environment. This is because “no one knows where they come from and the apps haven’t been properly reviewed.” And with there being more than 40,000 mHealth apps available right now, there’s definitely bound to be some bad ones. These apps could range from just having inaccurate information, to making outrageous claims.

In the same article, Fierce Mobile Healthcare talked about how a recent probe from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting showed how there are a lot of deceptive mHealth apps out there. As they put it, “consumers are being ‘bamboozled by hucksters.’”  The survey found that, of the 1,500 apps involved, more than 20 percent were not legitimate, and could possibly endanger people. Kind of scary. One would hope someone would be able to discern if something is real or not, but I imagine there’s some pretty savvy people out there who can make something look more real than it actual is.

I’m excited that it looks like Happtique is just about ready to start reviewing apps and certifying them. I think that it will really help add legitimacy to mHealth, and hopefully get more people to trust it — consumers and physicians alike.

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March 11, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: Health Care  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
Tags:Apps  Ben Chodor      mHealth Certification    New England Center for Investigative Reporting