Your doctor may soon prescribe you a smartphone app in addition to drugs and physical therapy. when IMS Health conducted primary research on mobile health activity, the data analytics company found about 90 percent of physicians willing to prescribe or recommend mobile health applications for patients.

A matching percentage of patients wanted their doctor to get involved with helping them find mobile tools specific to their care.

The reality, though, was that only about a third of doctors actually followed through to recommend or prescribe a mobile app.

"We are simplifying an otherwise complex mobile health market for physicians and patients," said Matt Tindall, general manager of consumer solutions at IMS Health.

“The mobile revolution is everywhere around us,” notes Joseph Kvedar, MD, president of the Center for Connected Health (CCH), a unit of Partners Healthcare in Boston.

“It’s all about mobile now, and physicians can’t help but notice that, and they feel they have to get involved in some way.” Mohit Kaushal, MD, a partner in Aberdare Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, agrees.

“The mobile health world has been around for a couple of years, and we’ve had a lot of experimentation and there are a lot of apps out there,” he points out. “So it’s not surprising that a subset of these apps are quite valuable and that doctors are recommending them.”