Alain Labrique, Ph.D., the founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Global mHealth Initiative, and his team recently conducted a survey of the mHealth studies that were registered in the government’s clinicaltrials.gov database as of November 2012. Labrique writes: ”We identified 215 unique mHealth studies that were registered in the clinicaltrials.gov database, of which 8.4 percent (n=18) were observational in nature while the remaining 91.6 percent (n=197) were interventional. Of the 215 studies, 81.8% (n=176) studies used a classical randomized trial design and 40 new studies were added to the database between May and November 2012 alone. Based on these results, we posit that the field is entering a new ‘era’ where a body of rigorous evaluation of mHealth strategies is rapidly accumulating.”

Labrique concludes: “The transition into an era of evidence-based mHealth supports our position that innovation in this domain can be evaluated with the same rigor as other public health strategies, attenuating some of the hype previously associated with mHealth.”

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