By David Haddad, program manager of Open mHealth

Next week, Pioneer grantee Open mHealth will showcase its work during the 2012 mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. at a panel with co-founder Deborah Estrin on Monday and an “Open mHealth” special session on Tuesday.

What Is an Open Architecture?

Open architecture is software with source code that is freely available to developers to promote cooperation and interoperability (as opposed to proprietary and copyrighted software). This means developers can more quickly and effectively work together to create optimized mHealth applications.

What Is Open mHealth, and Why Is It Important?

Nine out of 10 people on the planet own a cell phone—making it more common than owning a car, radio, or television. Mobile health (mHealth) apps are increasingly popular—with one in five smartphone users having a health app. We can use apps on our phones to help us stay healthy. Apps like epocrates allow us to find health information and learn about medicine; other apps can help us collect and share data about our health with our health care providers.

By the Open mHealth team

Note: This was cross-posted from the Open mHealth blog.

Open mHealth is proud to announce that we’re going to the 2012 mHealth Summit on December 3-5, in Washington, D.C. We’re going to be showcasing the power of integration using an open architecture across two disease domains—type 1 Diabetes and post-traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). We’ll be co-hosting a booth with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and 12 different technical partners, which represents a new level of collaboration in mHealth.

We’ve partnered with, and will be featuring, at the Summit: Alex Freeman (a patient with type 1 diabetes), Brian Venerick (a veteran with PTSD), Bodymedia, Runkeeper, Greendot Diabetes, Entra, Qualcomm Life’s 2Net, the Interaction Design Lab at Cornell University, Kaiser Permanente, Intel, Microsoft’s Health Vault, Ginger.io, Veteran Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, and Ohmage.

Today at the World Health Care Congress, Pioneer's Team Director Brian Quinn announced the winners of the Innovations for Health: Solutions that Cross Borders competition, supported by Pioneer and Ashoka Changemakers.  Innovations for Health looked to the international health community for forward-facing, transformative ideas with the potential to change health and medicine here in the United States.

We wanted to find cutting-edge solutions from anywhere in the world that have the potential to be applied in other countries to improve health and health care. While the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is devoted to improving the health and health care of Americans, this competition arises from what we call our “Flat World” work. That is the name we’ve given to our efforts that look around the world for innovations that could be used to solve the health and health care challenges we’re facing here in the United States.

Last year, the Pioneer portfolio partnered with Ashoka Changemakers to launch the Innovations for Health: Solutions that Cross Borders competition to find health care solutions from anywhere in the world that have the potential to be applied in other countries to improve health and health care.

After nearly 400 entries from 73 countries, we’re pleased to announce the finalists, and share a blog post with more details from Ashoka Changemakers. Stay tuned for the winners announcement on April 16!

In my recent blog post summarizing December’s mHealth Summit, I began by saying that the mHealth organizers must have been pleased with the conference, given its growth in attendance and engagement.

We were equally pleased with RWJF and Pioneer’s presence at the meeting – in fact, I’d say the meeting was a resounding success from our perspective.

Pioneer grantees Ben Sawyer and Debra Lieberman were both on panels featuring their work in health games and mobile technology. Deborah Estrin and Ida Sim announced the launch of Open mHealth, which is supported with funding from RWJF’s Pioneer Portfolio. And a session focused on this summer's mHealth Evidence meeting that was conceived of and co-sponsored by Pioneer.

Our Public Health Portfolio was also there looking for interesting perspectives on how mHealth could be deployed by public health departments to address a variety of health issues.

And finally, I was lucky enough to moderate a special session on a topic of keen interest to me and the portfolio.

“What I Really Need from mHealth: Five Perspectives on Value” featured a great cast of panelists including Robert Jarrin, senior director of Government Affairs for Qualcomm; Carol McCall, chief strategy officer at GNS Healthcare; Anmol Madan, founder of Ginger.io and visiting researcher at MIT Media Lab; and Richard Katz, director of cardiology at George Washington University Hospital.

Our session was structured around an imaginary mobile health application. The panelists discussed the value  of the application and how to demonstrate that value from the point of view of the individual, provider, various payers, regulators and researchers. This generated a fascinating conversation in which participants spoke from both a professional and personal perspective. Toward the end, we opened the discussion up to the attendees, which led to an informative and engaging discussion that will hopefully extend far beyond the session. The various perspectives are not completely aligned but yield something quite important when they do come together.

But wait, as they say on TV, there’s more! In addition to our panelists, we brought together about a dozen thought leaders, including representatives from organizations like NIH, Google, GNS Healthcare and the National Science Foundation, for a series of lively discussions about the future of mHealth and how to build value for all the players in the ecosystem. There was no lack of good ideas or strongly held opinions, and more questions were raised than answers offered. However, at the end of the night, we could all see light at the end of the tunnel. And that light came from a greater understanding of the value others saw in mHealth. From this newly fashioned broader vision, I’m hopeful we all left with a better sense of the way forward and with new ideas on how we could each play a role. 

I look forward to sharing more of what we learned and what this might mean for our investments in mHealth moving forward – and hearing your thoughts as well.