HealthManagement, Volume 5 / Issue 1 / 2010

Smart Personal Health is a new European Initiative to promote awareness about issues and challenges related to personal health systems interoperability, from technical to organisational and legal aspects.

 

More and more devices and applications are coming onto the market. They are often recommended by doctors and health insurers to help patients monitor their health and wellness. These personal health systems (PHS) are one of the key elements of the growth of European e-health. PHS will only realize their true potential if they are interoperable: a device from one vendor should work seamlessly together with another and other e-health applications.

 

Stakeholders must understand and support the challenges of personal health systems interoperability. These challenges are technical, organizational and legal.

 

The European Commission has called for action to support a wider understanding of interoperability amongst key stakeholders and has funded a Support Action to promote interoperability among personal health systems and to other e-health systems. The project SmartPersonalHealth started on 1 January 2010 and will run for one year.

 

Key activities of SmartPersonalHealth will include three thematically focused regional stakeholder workshops and one central pan-European PHS Interoperability Conference. Further networking and dialogue with healthcare providers, patients, industry, insurers, standard development organisations will be carried out. The Continua Health Alliance web portal will provide relevant information.

 

The workshops and related networking will result in a report addressed to the European Commission highlighting the current status, concerns, barriers and incentives to accelerate the development and adoption of interoperable PHS systems. Recommendations for interoperability promotion will be proposed to the EC, national governments, stakeholder groups and industry.

 

The programme is run by Continua Health Alliance, IHE-Europe, ETSI and Empirica, coordinated by The Centre, and funded under European Commission's FP7 Programme. The first event will be on 18 March 2010 in Barcelona.

 

For more information, visit: www.sph.continuaalliance.org/index.html

«« Healthcare IT Providers Need To Do More To Solicit User Feedback