IHE and PCHA Join Forces to advance mHealth

If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, I need another SDO to pay attention to like I need another hole in the head.  The number of organizations and "projects" and partnerships seems to have exploded over the last decade.

Here are some of the activities on my current radar screen:

• Argonaut Project
• CARIN Alliance
• Continua Health Alliance
• DaVinci Project
• Gravity Project
• Health Level 7
• IEEE P1752 Working Group
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise

There's a lot of great work going on in these spaces, but it's rather difficult to track it all, and it takes a rather large standards development team, membership and travel budget to be deep into where the important action is.  Some of these projects and alliances and SDO's charge significant membership fees in order to influence the activities that are being selected for future development.

Thankfully, I can now skip one of these, as the Continua specifications are now moving into the IHE Devices (formerly Patient Care Devices) domain as of last week.  

Quoting from the Press Release:

To further align and integrate specifications and test tools – and accelerate the adoption of remote patient monitoring -- PCHAlliance and IHE International are meeting in Boston this week during the Connected Health Conference to formally launch the Personal Connected Health subdomain within the IHE Patient Care Device Domain. Over the coming year, this group will develop IHE profiles that leverage and build upon the Continua Design Guidelines. Once complete, IHE will apply its established process for industry stakeholders to implement globally recognized, consensus-based approaches to connect and test both personal and clinical devices and integrate them into health information systems. Additionally, the Joint Task Force will explore and address how the specification supports both medical devices and mainstream consumer facing apps to enable scalable interoperability of the rapidly expanding connected health ecosystem.

Furthermore, the workgroup will be chartering a Mobile Health Apps domain to be:

A singular domain in which to coordinate the development of implementation guidelines to help patient and consumer facing application developers employ IHE profiles to apply the HL7 FHIR and other standards for the purpose of moving data between personal mobile devices and applications, and health information systems and exchanges.

It's long been the vision of PCHA and the Continua Health Alliance to enable patients and consumers to take advantage of personal health devices, and I think the Mobile Health Apps workgroup will help greatly as we expand the use of healthcare standards into health and wellness related apps and services.

If you are interested in learning more about the Mobile Health Apps domain, and want to learn more, just send me an e-mail.  We're still in the very early stages of formation, and hope to have a meeting in early Q1 2020 to kick things off.