Though they're proliferating rapidly, many of these medical apps face some strong challenges for health care providers and the hospitals in which much of the patient care is concentrated.

Hospitals, Reed explained, are very interested in adopting tablets for their medical staffs. But they also must figure out the best way for health care providers to not only access all these newly electronic medical records but interact with and update those records, too.

Clinical apps have additional hurdles.

"How do I take the data and put it into something that has clinical application?" Reed rhetorically asked, hypothetically describing an app where a physician might have to enter an order for additional morphine for a patient in need of pain management. In such an app, entering 5 picograms of the medication versus 5 micrograms (a million times more) is a huge difference, and not something you would want to get wrong due to a simple data entry error.

"This goes beyond 'look at me I lost five pounds' apps," Reed said. "We have to make sure we get this right. That means we have to embrace and work with the FDA."