During the HIMSS event in Atlanta last week MobiHealthNews made some news of our own when we launched our first research report: MobiHealthNews Presents: The World of Health and Medical Apps. During the six weeks leading up to HIMSS, the MobiHealthNews team scoured the close to 7,000 smartphone applications that are designated as health or medical related in application stores including iPhone's AppStore, Google's Android Market, BlackBerry's App World, Palm's App Catalog and Nokia's Ovi Store.

We discovered that less than 6,000 apps found within these stores are actually health, medical or fitness related. We then evaluated which of these apps were intended for use by consumers and patients and which were intended for use by healthcare professionals. Overall, there is about a 70-30 split for intended user: About 70 percent of all health-related smartphone apps are intended for use by consumers, while about 30 percent are intended for use by healthcare professionals.

Here's one of the 70 graphs from our report that shows the price distribution for consumer health iPhone apps (in green) vs. healthcare professional iPhone apps (purple):

Clearly, the most popular price for consumer health iPhone apps is $0.99 -- that pricetag is even more popular than "free." For healthcare professionals "free" is the most popular pricetag for iPhone apps. As the graph shows, a number of healthcare professional apps are priced at or above $19.99, while very few consumer apps fall into this price range.

MobiHealthNews: The World of Health and Medical Apps includes more than 56 pages of numbers and statistics detailing the types of health related smartphone applications. What percentage of apps are diabetes related? How many apps are medical calculators intended for use by healthcare professionals? What types of medical calculators are most prevalent? The report answers these questions and many more so that healthcare providers looking to launch medical applications can forge their mobile strategy with an eye on what's already available in the marketplace.

While most application stores do not disclose how many downloads a particular application has received since it launched, Google's Android Market does provide a range. For example, an app might have between "0 - 50" downloads or it might have ">250,000" downloads. Two health related applications for Android phones have received more than 250,000 downloads to date. In total, based on the ranges, we can conservatively estimate that health related apps for Android phones have so far achieved more than 3 million downloads. And that's with just about 500 health related apps available. Because it provides no numbers, we can only imagine how many downloads Apple's almost 6,000 health related applications have achieved.

The World of Health and Medical Apps is vast and varied -- let MobiHealthNews help you navigate through the numbers by purchasing our first paid research report today!