Did you know ? There are more than 50,000 health-labeled applications and the French are on average 43% to use them on a daily basis, according to a press release from the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS). Indeed, there are tons of them:from connected bracelets (which have their own dedicated app) to applications to monitor your diet, track your sleep or even just find answers to our health questions. And the question we all ask ourselves is:do these apps have real health value? Can we trust them? Until then, they were not regulated, which may suggest that some of them were indeed not terrible... HAS therefore decided to publish a guide to good practices, drawn up with the CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés) and the ANSSI (National Agency for the Security of Information Systems), intended for developers and application evaluators.
The guide, which can be consulted on the HAS website, is made up of 60 pages (yes, yes!). In total, 101 good practices are described there. Applications can be placed in different categories depending on whether they target the general public and health professionals, for example. In fact, each app will be subject to a different level of requirement, depending on whether it is general health advice or whether it clearly targets patients. All information will need to be medically verified and certified, and user data encrypted and anonymous. The purpose of this guide? That the so-called health applications are reliable so that users (individuals and professionals) can use them with confidence. We can only approve of this idea!
