Open mHealth Popular Standard (Part 1)

Andy OramIf standards have not been universally adopted in the health care field, and are often implemented incorrectly when adopted, the reason may simply be that good standards are hard to design. A recent study found that mobile health app developers would like to share data, but “Less progress has been made in enabling apps to connect and communicate with provider healthcare systems–a fundamental requirement for mHealth to realize its full value in healthcare management.”

Open mHealth faced this challenge when they decided to provide a schema to represent the health data that app developers, research teams, and other individuals want to plug into useful applications. This article is about how they mined the health community for good design decisions and decided what necessary trade-offs to make.

Designing a good schema involves intensive conversations with several communities that depend on each other but often have trouble communicating their needs to each other...