Mobile medical and health applications have been in a boom phase for the past few years, but despite this trend, one group of entities has had trouble breaking into the mobile medical app sphere, pharmaceutical (i.e., pharma) companies.  A recent report published by Research2Guidance,  indicates that most major pharmaceutical companies have had trouble generating downloads for their health-related apps and even when they do, have trouble getting users to continue using their products.[1]  For example, some of the most successful pharma companies have only a handful of apps and less than 1 million active users.[2]  By contrast, there are more than a hundred thousand health-related apps on Google’s Play store and Apple’s iTunes store based on recent calculations, and some experts estimate that there could be as many as 500 million users of medical applications by 2015.[3]  What is the cause of this inability to generate downloads or hang on to users?  There are a few possibilities.
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