To understand the information items used to describe digital health apps in repositories and to quantify the completeness of publicly displayed app-entry information items across these repositories.
Approach:
Sample Selection: 140 health apps were randomly selected from seven prominent repositories, which were chosen for their prominence in Europe and North America.
Key Findings:
The repositories varied significantly in the number of information items used to describe health apps, indicating a lack of consistency.
Safety-critical information was categorized separately from contextual information.
The completeness of information items varied across different repositories.
Interpretation:
The variability in information provided by different repositories may affect clinicians' ability to make informed prescribing decisions.
Limitations:
The study focused only on seven selected repositories, which may not represent the full spectrum of available digital health app repositories and their practices.
The assessment was limited to publicly available information as of January 2025.
Conclusion:
The findings indicate variability in information across digital health app repositories.
Brief GPT-4o chatbot conversations increased parents' HPV vaccination intentions immediately following exposure, but public health materials showed more durable effects, and no intervention increased self-reported vaccination uptake.
