Wading into the medical application sector is a complicated business. Just ask Morgan Reed, a programmer on the advisory council of . mHIMSS is the mobile group of the larger non-profit, an organization that works on improving IT systems for the healthcare industry.

Reed can paint a broad picture of the state of healthcare IT these days. Right now, healthcare IT is undergoing a major retooling of its own: there's a government-mandated shift to convert all healthcare records into electronic format, not to mention the need to comply with new regulations coming into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act.

"Last year, the government invested $38.7 billion into converting to electronic records," Reed said, emphasizing some of the churn that's going on in medical IT right now. Into that mix, Reed added, you have all these new health and medical apps jockeying for the attention of consumers and health care providers.

These apps fall into two categories. There are consumer-facing apps such as , , and even . These can be referred to as "health and fitness apps." There are even dedicated health and fitness devices, such as .

Then there are what can be described as the medical applications: apps that are used by health care providers to help clinically treat or manage information about patients. Apps within this category include , , or .