Interoperability and mHealth – Precondition for Successful eCare

Abstract

Background: Lately, the world’s biggest Professional Services company has recognized that mHealth is enabling and accelerating three major global trends in healthcare: regulatory reform driven by demographic changes, industrialization of the healthcare sector and personalized medicine. They have identified interoperability as a key enabler of scalable mHealth. Continua Health Alliance is a non-profit organization that globally certifies mobile health solutions. They publish interoperability guidelines for connecting health related devices. Unfortunately, the adoption of these guidelines has not been consistent. Problem: We want to define a platform and a framework to support the development of different e&m-health interventions for various domains. The solution has to support sharing of information between interventions within the system and also with external systems in a standardized way. Methodology: In the chapter we describe an approach towards interoperability that was achieved in several different aspects. First, the enterprise interoperability is supported by using IHE profiles.. Second, organizational interoperability is supported by use of BPMN2; and third, the semantic interoperability is supported by using OpenEHR, MLHIM and standard vocabularies. Results: We built the platform that permits iterative incremental development process of new interventions. The developed interventions are fully interoperable within e&m-health environments. On the platform we deployed five different interventions that were also clinically tested. In this chapter we describe eDiabetes intervention in greater detail. Besides, we give guidelines on how to develop and deploy a new intervention.