Personal Connected Health Standards Prevail

Michael Strubin, PCHAlliance European Programme Director, @mstrubin

For too long, telemedicine has been trapped in a vicious circle of insufficient evidence, sceptical professionals, and “pilotitis”, the proliferation of experimental projects that have by-and-large failed to generate evidence.

But now things are changing, due to the growing interest of decision-makers in Europe to harness the potential of telemedicine for health care reform, to make more effective use of resources and to empower the patients:

·        Denmark:  National rollout of COPD telemonitoring as of 2018 following the TeleCare Nord project with more than 1,100 chronic COPD patients.

·        Nordics:  government agencies have developed a common reference architecture for personal connected health to facilitate market access.

·        Catalonia:  public health system requires standards for citizens and patients to share glucose data.

·        Netherlands:  Ministry of Health considers mandating standards for uploading patient data to the Medmij ("With Me") patient platform.

·        Austria:  Ministry of Health proposes technical framework directive on telemonitoring of people with diabetes, heart failure and cardiac implants.

·        Switzerland: mHealth recommendations (in German/in French) from eHealth Suisse reference international standards such as Continua, HL7 and IHE.

·        Germany:  federal law mandates building of an interoperability registry for the German healthcare system called “Vesta”.

Read the full blog on LinkedIn, or the original German version on www.e-health-com.de.

Visit the PCHAlliance stand at Medica in Hall 15 A23 (at the Wearable Technologies booth). More information at www.pchalliance.org.