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.  

What's your recipe for a great mHealth App? Sean Broomhead previously posted on Linkedin

Knowing what problem you are trying to solve is the most important part of any product. The next is having a team that understands the problem and how to solve it or find solutions for it.

One of the biggest problem that I have run into is that lack of understanding from both the clinical and technical side of the solution. Many technical people attempt to solve healthcare without domain expertise. Yes, we are all patients, the main reason you see so many patient facing apps, however if you want to build medical apps you will need clinical domain experts. Then you have doctors that want to build apps without having technical knowledge or don't understand the software process. Both roads can quickly lead to failure. It takes BOTH technical and clinical to build mHealth apps or systems.

Systems, apps are mostly worthless without a link into the ecosystem of healthcare. you must think of an app as just the client of the system, it is like the steering wheel of a car. You shouldn't care if it is a iPhone or Android, that is the endusers decision, app developers need to support what the market wants. The system is what is important in mHealth, how you connect, interoperate with providers, family, and patients.

Jeff Brandt 

Mobile changes everything

Mobile presents one of the largest paradigm shift of all time. I recently read a article that ranked the iPhone the eighth top invention of all time. The wheel was first. But mobile is not about communication it is about connectivity. A fully connected society, a connected world. We must rethink our current strategies on everything. From banking to healthcare to communication, mobile changes it all. Advertising industry is going to change significantly. We are moving from print, TV, radio and computers to always "on" (connected and on our person) personal devices. Each time a person looks at the screen of the phone/device they will receive impressions, not the old CPC (Cost Per Click) type, but in many different forms, audio, visual, static and participating impressions. The number if hits (old term) will become more of experiences, (Mx) and will be exponential.

As many of you know I am very interested in HealthCare and it's future in the world. Mobile will have a huge impact on healthcare, soon we will have implanted monitoring devices that will feed data to a site such as Microsoft HealthVault, Decision Support system will analyze the data in realtime and alert the patient/consumer and Provider of changes in your body. But the biggest change that mobile will providein health is the ability for the consumer to become realtime envolved with their own health. Our phones will become the Remote control of our Healthcare and the screens will have dashboards so that we can monitor ourselves in realtime. The next subject that I plan to discuss is changing our views of mobile and opening thoughts up to the possibilities of engagement.

Jeff