Why patients won’t use chronic disease apps

The healthcare system is flooded with mobile apps—more than 165,000 are currently available in the Apple and Google app stores. Even though mobile apps have great potential to help with the most pressing healthcare problem in the U.S.—chronic disease—they are hardly making a dent in helping to provide a digital health solution.

That is the chief conclusion of a pair of Harvard business and medical researchers that just authored a controversial article now out in the Harvard Business Review. The Centers for Disease...