David H Haddad*, Open mHealth, Washington, DC, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Mobile & Tablet Health Applications Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School Room: Auditorium Date: 2012-09-15 02:00 PM – 02:45 PM Last modified: 2012-09-12

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mHealth applications are rich sources of passively and actively collected data. The value of this data, however, emerges only once they are analyzed to understand a person’s health status or response to different types of health/clinical interventions. When fed back across the healthcare continuum, mHealth data will transform and improve care and best practices.

However, since mHealth data are so diverse, complex, and voluminous, it is challenging to extract relevant features and patterns for the vast range of uses that are imagined. The mHealth ecosystem is currently struggling to develop and disseminate the tools and techniques for visualizing, interpreting, drawing conclusions from, and acting on mHealth data. We cannot begin to integrate mHealth into daily life and clinical care without a robust set of these tools and techniques.

The current mHealth ecosystem is also siloed which hinders the scaling and impact of mHealth. Transformation of personal and population health will be unlikely without a vibrant community of health and tech innovators jointly contributing to the co-creation and validation of mHealth solutions. Moreover, the software itself is too often built in silos without integration across systems and with negligible sharing of methods, data, or evidence. An open architecture that promotes modular components with common interfaces, and an open community that engages both developers and health innovators, will catalyze efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation; much like an open architecture and community did for the Internet.

Open mHealth's mission is amplify mHealth innovation to improve both personal and population health outcomes. Open mHealth is: (1) building an open software architecture: Sharing an open source architecture and reusable, running code that allows users to quickly and cheaply launch a spot-on problem solving app that incorporates validated health software practices, and that is connected by other systems. (2) Enabling a community of developers and health innovators: By offering high-value software modules from the open architecture, we will help galvanize health and tech innovators to save resources (time and money) in the short run, while benefiting in the long run from the robustness and future-proofing that comes with open source components. To enable a community where health innovators and developers can jointly advance open mHealth tools and contribute to the shared software architecture

Intrinsic to Open mHealth’s mission is to work collaboratively with various actors, encompassing public, private, proprietary, open source, health and tech worlds.

Some groups may choose to reuse only a few modules, while others may implement an end-to-end system based largely on the full open architecture and its modules. This type of collaborative cooperation will support competitors’ unique market offerings while simultaneously growing the value of the open architecture. Open mHealth community members will integrate open software modules into their own software platforms, complementary to, and integrated with, their own proprietary components.

By adopting this approach, and being strongly integrative across both the tech and health sectors, we hold the unique position of being trusted by the community and poised to remain a key player in the movement to transform health through mobile technology.