In this month's issue of Academic Emergency Medicine, VonHoltz et al.1 describe the use of mobile applications (“apps”) by patients in the ED and report that although 44% of patients with smartphones had downloaded health apps, utilization of these apps was infrequent. The authors noted that physician recommendations played a small role in influencing a patient's use of health apps. While physicians may lack enough familiarity with apps to make informed recommendations, the authors also hypothesize that physicians are simply unlikely to recommend apps in the face of the lack of evidence for them. Apps have intuitive functionality for use in patient care. Physicians have long used apps for clinical decision support, enhancement of efficiency and productivity, and quality and accuracy of documentation and medication prescribing.2 It seems logical that apps could be developed that patients like to use and that fill well-known vulnerabilities in our health care system; for example, apps to remind a patient to take a medication, to make recommendations for self-care, to ask about disease progression after a diagnosis in the ED, or as recently reported by Arora et al.3 in this journal, to provide reminders of follow-up appointments after discharge from the ED. Despite the mind-numbing number of health care apps already available (a 2013 review of apps available through iTunes identified 16,275 providing health content for the general consumer) few have undergone any sort of efficacy testing before (or after) being released to the market.4 Further, even when evaluated for functionality (not for effect on health outcomes), fewer than 5% fare well. It is no wonder that patients are finding little role for apps once they are downloaded. Nevertheless, the promise of apps is tremendous, and their incorporation into our practice feels inevitable. VonHoltz et al.1 found that 71% of ED patients had smartphones, and 44% of smartphone users had downloaded health apps. While these percentages likely vary among populations, it seems fair to assume that many of our patients are capable of, and interested in, using health care apps. Given our perennial concerns about our brief point of contact with our patients, the limitations of the acute care visits, and our patient population's poor access to health care, emergency medicine seems the perfect specialty to embrace digital health as a means to expand the scope and reach of the care we provide. Perhaps, at the least, emergency physicians should begin to anticipate that many of their patients are using apps, ask which ones they are using, and become familiar enough with what is out there to guide them about the advantages or limitations of apps. Waiting for an evidence base for specialized health care apps does not mean that we remain silent on technology; physicians might simply work with patients who depend upon general lifestyle or organizational apps (like calendars) and urge them to incorporate health care functions. This might be as simple as suggesting, “Why don't we add an alarm on your phone to remind you to take this antibiotic every 6 hours for the next 10 days,” or “Let's put your follow-up appointment in your calendar right now,” or “That app you have is giving you misinformation about the effects of vaccines on your health.” The lack of evidence and functionality of existing apps is, in the meantime, an open invitation to our field. As physicians with first-hand experience of critical deficiencies in health care, we must work with app developers to guide the purpose of new apps or begin to lead the development of apps ourselves. Most apps provide health information, so physicians should become engaged in evaluating the quality, accuracy, and safety of this information. As researchers, we need to develop standardized and validated tools for the evaluation and development of apps and take responsibility for fulfilling the great need for evidence-based assessment of emerging apps. The traditional timeline of randomized controlled trials is likely a poor fit for the digital health world; we should expect to apply study designs (e.g., adaptive clinical trials) that can match the rapid rate of app development. Finally, as discussed by Birnbaum et al.,5 in a commentary in this issue, we should ensure that the other experts on health care needs—the patients themselves—are engaged participants in development, a critical step in creating apps that are to survive beyond the initial download. VonHoltz et al. have raised important questions for emergency medicine. We have thus far been largely absent from the process of developing, ensuring the quality of, and engaging with our patients around mobile health apps. The opportunity exists to develop useful information and treatment devices for our patients and to develop protections against potentially harmful or misleading apps.