Mobile apps for patient safety: Scoping review

Technological innovation can help promote patient safety, either through the involvement of the patients themselves in this process or through the development of systems that directly assist the health professionals (Neto, Silva and Santos, 2019; Gomez, 2017). Thousands of apps are released annually, nearly 325,000 health apps were available on app stores in 2017. Many of these apps are developed without the involvement of experts in the field and without a clear validation and evaluation process. Thus, although M-health may assist in patient safety, it can also act in the opposite way by offering information that is not based on scientific evidence (Akbar S, Coiera E, Magrabi, 2020). Consequently, it is important to evaluate the available apps prior to using them. Faced with the need to encourage research studies and technological innovations that can contribute to patient safety, it is justified to carry out a scoping review that allows mapping the apps developed for this thematic area. It is believed that this survey will be able to identify gaps and indicate ways to devise technologies that may contribute advances in relation to the existing models. Thus, this review aims at mapping the scientific production related to apps targeted at patient safety