Kaiser Permanente, Qualcomm Life, WellTok And More Support Open mHealth To Catalyze An Open Mobile Health Ecosystem

With 6 billion phones in people’s pockets worldwide, and over 20,000 health apps now in the marketplace, tracking everything from fitness to stress to sleep is becoming a part of modern life. But without an easy way to integrate these applications or their data, we have yet to unlock the full potential of mobile health (mHealth). Open mHealth is building the way to integrate apps and data, to provide deep, personalized insights for consumers and practitioners, and ultimately better health.

Today, Open mHealth is proud to be leading the anchor panel at the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) Convergence Summit 2013. Together with John Mattison (CMIO Kaiser Permanente, SCAL), Chuck Parker (Executive Director, Continua Health Alliance), Kabir Kasargod (Director, Qualcomm Life) and Maneesh Goyal (VP, WellTok), we will discuss why an open architecture is critical to going beyond ‘connected health’, which while connected may still be fragmented. Breaking down barriers to integration will allow mHealth solutions to be more effective by being adaptive and flexible to meet the full breadth of patients’ changing needs.

We are even more excited to announce the Open mHealth ‘Catalyst’ initiative, with the support of WLSA. The Catalyst initiative represents our partners’ commitments to Open mHealth. These partners — some of whom are represented by our WLSA panelists — recognize the need to be “open” and are leading the way in building out their products and services using Open mHealth. Their leadership and commitment will support the Open mHealth ecosystem, further build out the Open mHealth architecture, and make it easier for more partners to come onboard.

A selection of these commitments include:

360’ Data for Diabetes: Ginger.io, Entra and Kaiser Permanente in San Diego are launching a pilot using the Open mHealth architecture to integrate data into Kaiser Permanente’s Complete Care initiative for Type 2 diabetes, with a focus on the mental health risks associated with the condition. This pilot will be integrating behavioral analysis from Ginger.io’s app as well as glucose and weight data from the Entra MyGlucoHealth system via Qualcomm Life’s 2Net platform.

“We have a very talented and dedicated group of innovative clinicians who are working with multiple vendors, all in a single pilot using the Open mHealth architecture. While individual apps alone can provide modest value, it is the coordination of sensing technologies, analytics, behavioral economics, and clinical workflows which constitute the critical opportunity to create the “behavioral symphony for wellness” necessary to effectively and persistently modify behaviors to improve the health of a population.” - John Mattison of Kaiser Permanente.

A ‘nutritious’ data exchange: WellTok is helping health plans and other population managers engage their members and improve health outcomes through social media technology. They are committing to pulling in at least two new data streams via Open mHealth API calls, and working with at least one data provider to implement the Open mHealth API. FoodCare will, as part of their core development strategy, be making highly advanced and personalized nutrition guidance for individuals with nutrition-related chronic diseases available to the Open mHealth ecosystem later this summer. Together, WellTok and FoodCare will be exploring data exchange around nutrition advice for patients and consumers through Open mHealth.

Geo for health: Calit2‘s Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego will implement Open mHealth for ‘DELPHI’– a research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) — to explore the intersection of geolocation and health, specifically for asthma and diabetes

Know yourself: TicTrac will be using Open mHealth APIs to integrate data streams from various 3rd parties including Entra, Ginger.io, and Qualcomm, to provide users of their Lifestyle Design platform with ‘personal analytics’ tools to gain a better understanding of themselves.

And more: In addition to being part of the panel, Qualcomm Life is continuing to promote and support the easy accessibility of the 2Net API through Open mHealth. Additionally, the Continua Health Alliance will collaborate with Open mHealth to identify opportunities for coordination with the Open mHealth specification relevant to the Alliance’s technology framework to facilitate an interoperable ecosystem of end-to-end, plug-and-play services, devices and systems for personal connected health.

“Open technologies and the sharing of knowledge enhance the WLSA mission of empowering consumer health and accelerating the adoption of innovative approaches, and we are pleased to offer ongoing support for the Open mHealth Catalyst initiative,”
Rob McCray, CEO of WLSA.

Intrigued? We’re opening up the invitation for everyone building mHealth applications and solutions to ‘go Open mHealth’! To join the Catalyst initiative, submit your Open mHealth goals here.