First Open mHealth Summit, a success for mobile health

I was lucky enough to be invited to the Open mHealth Summit event in San Francisco to witness the unveiling of the latest mobile framework and protocol for healthcare. I have been talking with Dr Ida Sim of UCSF for a few years about there Open mHealth (OMH) project.  We both agreed that there is a need for a protocol/standard to transport data between wireless smart devices without the overhead of the land based HL7 standards such as CDA or CCDA.  Several years before meeting Dr Sim I decided to quit complaining about HL7, so I joined and started try to bring about change in mHealth from within.  When I first read about Graham Grieve's FHIR, a Restful API interface to supplement or replace the CCDA I was thrilled, and implemented a version in a project before HL7 got a hold of it.  HL7 FHIR attempted to solve some of the mobile issues but fell short IMHO by implementing XML and retaining  some of the legacy overhead from the CDA.  FHIR, is good solution for web based solutions that need to communicate directly with and EHR or mobile with 4G, however much of the world including the US doesn’t have 4G and the overhead is still quite high and many solutions do not need to communicate directly with and EHR. 

Dr Sim and her colleagues have a dream to simplify the sharing of health data and there are well on their way to doing it.  If what I saw yesterday is any indication of the future, Open mHealth is the direction to follow.   Open mHealth as it names states is open source, it is not a standard, however most standards do not guarantee interoperability and never will.  The solution is Restfull APIs with “standard” clinical templates to share meaningful data.  OMH already has many supporter that are helping to extend the platform.  Catalyst has a solution that converts OMH into HL7 V2 (circa 1989) the most widely used protocol of healthcare and back again,  now that is interoperability.  There is also a project, Granola to serialize Apple healthKit and that alone is worth the effort to check out OMH.  

OMH doesn’t solve all the Interoperability issues and they are not really trying to, however they are solving the problem of sharing health data and reducing the amount of payload that is transmitted with a mobile smartphone.  Getting the EHR Vendors to except the data or to share their patient data that is locked in their silos is still an issue. 

I am very hopeful and excited about the work OmH has done to date.