By Thom Erickson, Director of Technical Standards, Personal Connected Health Alliance

You’ve dedicated your company to develop a Remote Patient Monitoring product that will make a real impact on reducing patient anxiety in the home and save critical resources at the clinic in the battle against the virus causing COVID-19. Most importantly, your product will save lives.

Your team has taken great care in digesting the open standards that define important capabilities of Remote Patient Monitoring. You have carefully implemented these standards using design guidelines and profiles to achieve the interoperability that is critical to seamlessly and securely moving health data anywhere on the globe. Now you want to demonstrate to your customers that your product is up to the task.

Demonstrate compliance to your customers

The Personal Connected Health Alliance and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise have developed a set of globally recognized test processes and suite of freely available test tools to demonstrate to your customer that your team achieved its interoperability goals and is ready to make a global impact in the battle against the coronavirus.

Conformity assessment provides a transparent and universal mechanism to assure compliance with procurement requirements. This is especially valuable in the complex, demanding and highly fragmented healthcare IT market.

IHE International administers the IHE Conformity Assessment Scheme (CAS). This defines the processes for accrediting and operating test labs. It defines the standardized test methods for assessing conformity to IHE profiles. IHE Connectathons provide a detailed implementation and testing process to enable systems to exchange information with corresponding systems in a structured and supervised peer-to-peer testing environment.

The PCHA Conformity Assessment Scheme supports vendors self-declaring directly with their customers, or via 3^rd-party certification, that their products conform to industry standards. This scheme achieves that delicate balance between a comprehensive and rigorous method for ensuring devices meet stated functional requirements yet demonstrated within an affordable time and cost that allows vendors to be profitable in a highly competitive market.

Draw upon certification experts

To help guide you through these processes, the PCHA recognizes certification experts who each possess a comprehensive understanding of the open standards, design guidelines, supporting technologies, commercial ready software, test procedures and tools, and implementation best practices.

Open Source Tools

The Personal Connected Health Alliance has available today a home to hospital solution that allows any sensor to connect to any gateway and any clinical health record system to provide a holistic picture of their well-being without direct contact with their doctor until medical intervention is required for successful outcome.

Engage your engineering and product teams today to learn more about how you can quickly and easily provide remote patient monitoring products to meet the exploding demand for solutions that keep doctors safe and patients empowered.

The next blog in this series describes the commercial ready software available today that implements the open standards per the design guidelines and profiles. This can reduce your integration time from months to days.