With close to a quarter of the world’s population overweight, more than 600 million people with some form of chronic disease and millions more reaching retirement age, the time for greater personal health management is now, said Dave Whitlinger, Continua Health Alliance President.
He emphasized that Continua member companies are working on real solutions to empower consumers and healthcare professionals to access and share information quickly and easily through connected products and solutions. “Together, we can create a new marketplace, improve health and quality of life, and advance personal telehealth worldwide” said Whitlinger.
The first public device and solution demo to show interoperability among pre-certified products and services was presented on October 27th at the Partners Center for Connected Health Annual Connected Health Symposium held in Boston Massachusetts. Continua members A&D, Cambridge Consultants, Cypak, FitLinxx, Google, IBM, Intel, NHS, Nonin, Oracle, Partners, Philips, Roche, Stollman, and University Health Network provided the devices and software solutions.
The demos showed how data can be shared seamlessly across a variety of environments both in the home and professional settings to help consumers and professionals better manage personal health and wellness. The attendees were able to see the benefits of real-time information sharing that improves data for diagnostics and treatment, results in savings in time and costs, and improves patient experiences.
Google and Dossia are now part of the Continua membership and will help to ensure that current and future PHR/PHS applications can be used across a wide array of Continua-certified devices.
Both organizations are focused on creating richer consumer healthcare experiences through tools and applications to allow for secure information storage and retrieval.
In other news, Continua has selected AT4 as its Test Tool vendor, released the first edition of “Vendor Assisted Source Code” to the membership, delivered a database of all peer-reviewed remote patient monitoring literature conducted in the last 5 years in Europe and the U.S., now researching a White Paper “U.S. Policy Environment for Remote Chronic Disease Management”, and Continua and IHE have signed a Memorandum of Agreement to promote interoperability of healthcare devices.
The Continua Health Alliance helps members and non-members seeking appropriate vendors for new health and chronic disease management programs through Continua’s Matchmaking program (www.continuaallliance.org/match_program). The program helps healthcare providers find world class vendors that have developed the next generation of personal telehealth devices and services.
