Peer Review of Healthcare Apps: Advance Informatics Nurse Practitioner

This report is a peer review of two consumer health connectivity tools: a period tracker app and the "What to Expect" app. The review highlights the benefits of the period tracker app, such as its usefulness in tracking menstrual cycles for natural contraception and aiding in conception. However, it also points out the app's limitations, including potential complications arising from irregular cycles. The review of the "What to Expect" app focuses on its role in providing information about fetal development to pregnant women, especially teenagers. It emphasizes the app's benefits in tracking and providing information about pregnancy. The review also critiques the app for lacking personalized health considerations and failing to replace the need for healthcare experts. The assignment concludes by posing critical questions about the apps' effectiveness and their ability to address various health concerns.

Running head: REVIEWING PEERS ARTICLE
Advance Informatics Nurse Practitioner Program
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1REVIEWING PEERS ARTICLE
The engagement of technology in the healthcare has led the non-healthcare organizations
to develop several healthcare related tools, which has already been established in this consumer
centric marketplace. There are several reminding or alerting apps, health tracking tools and
software that provide educational informations present to help patients and their health related
needs. This document will critically evaluate the two consumer health connectivity tools the
period tracker app and What to expect app presented by my peer so that further discussion can be
resumed.
While reading my peers assignment, it was clearly evident that the period tracking app is
useful for women to recall about their last period cycle as maximum of them tend to forget that.
Several benefits of the period tracking app that I identified was regarding the timeline of the
periods that help women to undergo a hormone free way for contraception (Moglia et al., 2016).
Further, the app provides benefits such as ovulating time or the most appropriate time to
conceive, therefore helps in conceiving or avoiding pregnancy. However, the peer’s assignment
failed to include the negative aspects or barriers related to the app such as occurrence of
unnatural period cycle, and related complications in conceiving or avoiding pregnancy
(Anderson, Burford & Emmerton, 2016). Therefore the questions that arises for this application
are: what are the consequences of untimed periods while conceiving and avoiding pregnancy?
The second app which was discussed was What to expect app and it is an electronic
version of the famous book. This book determines the development of the babies through
pictures and hence, teenage moms can get proper idea about child development through this
book. This application provides a clear idea about the healthcare needs provide the pregnant
women with easily accessible informations that educate them for their betterment (Franchak &

2REVIEWING PEERS ARTICLE
Adolph, 2014). Few benefits of the app that should be highlighted in this section are providing a
tracking system to the pregnant women, a week by week development information of the fetus
inside the womb and importance of happiness, health and meditation while pregnancy so that
pregnant women devote their time for personal healthcare. However, the assignment of my peer
was unable to include the negative aspects of it. This app is a modification of a book into an
electronic app and does not include any specification related to the reader, her health and
presence of any complication in her pregnancy (Lupton & Thomas, 2015). Further, this
application just provided general tips helpful in pregnancy and development of fetus inside
mother’s womb. However, did not included any personalized section for each pregnant women
(Franchak & Adolph, 2014). Hence the question that arises after reading the peer’s assignment
is: Did the app ‘What to accept is able to replace the need of healthcare experts in pregnancy?
Further, did the application is able to answer all the complication that a healthcare expert can
answer? These are the questions that arises after reviewing the peers assignment related to the
healthcare tools used in patient engagement.

3REVIEWING PEERS ARTICLE
References
Anderson, K., Burford, O., & Emmerton, L. (2016). Mobile health apps to facilitate self-care: a
qualitative study of user experiences. PLoS One, 11(5), e0156164.
Franchak, J. M., & Adolph, K. E. (2014). Gut estimates: Pregnant women adapt to changing
possibilities for squeezing through doorways. Attention, Perception, &
Psychophysics, 76(2), 460-472.
Lupton, D., & Thomas, G. M. (2015). Playing pregnancy: the ludification and gamification of
expectant motherhood in smartphone apps. M/C Journal, 18(5).
Moglia, M. L., Nguyen, H. V., Chyjek, K., Chen, K. T., & Castaño, P. M. (2016). Evaluation of
smartphone menstrual cycle tracking applications using an adapted APPLICATIONS
scoring system. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 127(6), 1153-1160.