Abstract
BackgroundGovernment agencies in the United States are creating mobile health (mHealth) apps as part of recent policy changes initiated by the White House’s Digital Government Strategy.ObjectiveThe objective of the study was to understand the institutional and managerial barriers for the implementation of mHealth, as well as the resulting adoption pathways of mHealth.MethodsThis article is based on insights derived from qualitative interview data with 35 public managers in charge of promoting the reuse of open data through Challenge.gov, the platform created to run prizes, challenges, and the vetting and implementation of the winning and vendor-created apps.ResultsThe process of designing apps follows three different pathways: (1) entrepreneurs start to see opportunities for mobile apps, and develop either in-house or contract out to already vetted Web design vendors; (2) a top-down policy mandates agencies to adopt at least two customer-facing mobile apps; and (3) the federal government uses a policy instrument called “Prizes and Challenges”, encouraging civic hackers to design health-related mobile apps using open government data from HealthData.gov, in combination with citizen needs. All pathways of the development process incur a set of major obstacles that have to be actively managed before agencies can promote mobile apps on their websites and app stores.ConclusionsBeyond the cultural paradigm shift to design interactive apps and to open health-related data to the public, the managerial challenges include accessibility, interoperability, security, privacy, and legal concerns using interactive apps tracking citizen.
Highlights
The Federal Government and Open Data The Open Government Directive and Digital Government Strategy of the Obama Administration call for innovative approaches to increase participation, collaboration, and transparency of government operations, especially with mobile phone apps [1,2]
The qualitative data show that public managers follow three different pathways to develop mobile health apps
Government agencies face significant barriers as soon as mobile apps are developed that have to be addressed before apps are officially confirmed and promoted on the agency’s website
Summary
The Federal Government and Open Data The Open Government Directive and Digital Government Strategy of the Obama Administration call for innovative approaches to increase participation, collaboration, and transparency of government operations, especially with mobile phone apps [1,2]. Using a policy instrument called Prizes and Challenges, developer contests such as the Health 2.0 program invite civic hackers as well as professional problem solvers to reuse health-related public sector data and crowdsource solutions in the form of mobile phone apps [2]. Both initiatives are designed to create public awareness, and to promote external innovations based on citizen needs. Government agencies in the United States are creating mobile health (mHealth) apps as part of recent policy changes initiated by the White House’s Digital Government Strategy
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