Connected Health Conference 25-27 October, Boston–save $100! (updated)

Connected Health Conference, 25-27 October, Seaport World Trade Center, Boston Massachusetts

The eighth annual Connected Health Conference, is now presented by the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) in partnership with Partners Connected Health, with a combined and rebooted annual meeting in Boston. The largest global conference in connected health has surfed many changes from the time it was started as the mHealth Summit (and Telecare Aware was one of the first media sponsors) in Washington, DC. This year’s theme, The Connected Life Journey: Shaping Health and Wellness for Every Generation, is centered around the future of technology-enabled health, wellness and what innovation means for over 2,000 providers, researchers, healthcare executives, and developers. CHC17’s location is now in Boston’s Innovation District versus a fairly remote part of Foggy Bottom–and early fall! (For more on CHC’s evolution, see here.)

Wednesday the 25th has a full day of pre-conference specialized sessions here, such as the Society for Participatory Medicine and Parks Associates‘ workshop, with the full conference and open exhibit hall on Thursday and Friday. Continua has a running Plugfest for those involved with Continua standards on Thursday and Friday. Also on those days is CHC’s own Health Tech StandOut! Competition featuring a group of ten finalists, free for conference registrants and the Connected Health Innovation Challenge (CHIC) (information here).

For the main website and for registration, click on the ad in the sidebar. TTA Readers save $100 on registration–use code CHC17TELE100. TTA is a media sponsor of CHC17. For updates, see on Twitter #Connect2Health and @PCHAlliance

Update: The PCHAlliance published today a research paper, Personal Connected Health: The State of the Evidence and a Call to Action. This is a meta-study of 53 studies and trials for setting an initial baseline for evidence in personal connected health. The key findings on the current state will come as no surprise–that better studies are needed that show evidence in clinical trials and real-world use. Release, study (download links)

WLSA merger with PCHAlliance: the digital health conference scene contracts a bit more

Over the weekend, the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHAlliance) and the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) announced that the San Diego-based WLSA would be combining its operations with the PCHAlliance. This follows on the earlier announcement [TTA 21 Oct] that the Boston-based and Partners HealthCare- owned Connected Health Symposium would be folding its operation into the PCHAlliance. Both Robert B. McCray, co-founder and CEO of WLSA, and Dr Joseph Kvedar of Partners HealthCare are now Senior Advisers to the PCHAlliance, with Mr McCraw heading Thought Leadership and Dr Kvedar now Program Chair of next year’s event.

WLSA has been largely inactive on the conference scene since 2015, when it staged its last Convergence Summit in May and the Wireless Health event in October of that year. The Convergence Summit has been merged into PCHAlliance’s Connected Health Conference kicking off today near Washington, DC. The Wireless Health event will continue through a collaboration with IEEE/EMBS cooperating with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In their release, PCHAlliance emphasized WLSA’s experience in research within engineering, computer science, biomedical and health disciplines. Patricia (Patty) Mechael, PhD, Executive Vice President, PCHAlliance in the release was quoted that “Their focus on medical and health research communities is a perfect compliment to our commitment to accelerate the adoption of clinical grade technology in consumer-friendly health outcomes- based business models.” Life science companies will be welcomed for membership in the PCHAlliance. PCHAlliance also includes Continua, which for well over a decade has been promoting engineering standards for device interoperability.

As this Editor looked back in October, when most of these organizations and events started about 2007-8, there were few Big Health conferences that took what was then dubbed eHealth and mHealth (later Digital Health) seriously. Now, of course, they do. There are also multiple events, large and small, expensive and popularly priced, every month in many cities–we attended and reported on #MedMo16 which will be branching out to multiple cities in 2017.

In looking back at our articles, the WLSA was engaged with the conference almost from the start, when the mHealth Summitwas one of the first ‘big name/big support’ conferences. Its tack then was governmental policy and what international NGOs were doing as a model for developed nations. It was organized by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Health and the mHealth Alliance up to 2012, when HIMSS took it over.

Grizzled Pioneers, and even the non-grizzled, can testify to the multiple phases in a decade up and down the Hype Curve: device-driven, mobile-driven, sensor-driven, telehealth, wearables, Big Data, population health, patient engagement, analytics, data integration, outcomes-based and a few others. This move confirms that many factors are blending: academic, engineering, software, biotech, genomics, social, behavioral, governmental–and that technology is not standalone or sitting in isolation, but is integrating and manifesting itself in all sorts of interesting places both behind the consumer scene and in policy, and to consumers on mobiles and in the home (IoT, which hasn’t resolved its multiple and obvious security problems).

Also Neil Versel in MedCityNewsTTA is a media partner of the PCHA CHC for the 8th year, starting in 2009 when it was the brand new mHealth Summit. Conference tweets on #connect2health.

A diagnosis of why digital health startups die–an old (and new) story

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/upside-down-duck.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]For years now, your Editors have championed integration of data and system interoperability–search on these terms and you’ll find a wealth of articles and views. This Editor also included how data is integrated in patient records as the Fifth Big Question (FBQ) in 2012 [TTA 8 Aug 13]. Many digital health companies, not just startups, have failed at the data integration (and security) tasks, whether with EHRs, hubs, billing and practice management systems or with other devices. (Let us not forget that the initial impetus for Continua back in 2007, the US state/regional HIXs and for HL7 now, was to have common data and interchange standards.)

So there’s no real element of surprise here by John Sung Kim’s pleading in TechCrunch re ‘integrating into legacy systems’ and the troubles his own startup DoctorBase encountered in what he tactfully puts ‘political and technical hurdles’ encountered. But then the velvet gloves come off about EHRs and their less-than-scrupulous idea of ‘partnerships’. (more…)

Avoiding the FDA health IT-medical device regulatory trap for general IT companies (US)

If you are an IT company in the US or internationally with services which could be useful to healthcare companies or practitioners, it’s easy to be overly specific and stray into FDA-regulated territory. The always-informative Bradley Merrill Thompson of the Epstein Becker Green law firm delineates the fine regulatory line that general purpose IT companies must observe when working with healthcare customers. First there is intended use, based on how the manufacturer intends its customer to use the product; if the customer uses it for the diagnosis or treatment of disease or other conditions, FDA will regulate it as a medical device. This is less clear than it seems, and Mr Thompson explores where a general IT company can, in the old PR adage, ‘say it safely’ and avoid falling into the unwanted medical device trap by avoiding medical feature and advice claims, and keeping the context away from medical use. The Journal of mHealth (August)–online version, optional PDF download. Hat tip to Mr Thompson via the Continua LinkedIn group. Other articles of interest in the JMH are: Scottish company HCi Viocare and its ‘smart insole’ pressure sensors for foot ulcer detection following, Northwestern University’s research around patterns of smartphone usage detecting depression (page 19) and a lengthy article on transforming patient data into actionable insights (page 34).

FDA publishes medical device interoperability standards (US)

While FDA is still dithering about issuing draft guidance on mHealth, it looks like medical device manufacturers can break out the champs, because FDA has now recognized 25 standards on medical device interoperability and cybersecurity. According to Bakul Patel of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at FDA, “Making sure devices are interoperable requires the creation, validation, and recognition of standards that help manufacturers develop products that are harmonious and can “plug and play.” It’s an alphabet soup of industry standard abbreviations–IEEE, ANSI, AAMI, ISO, IEC and ASTM–and it’s purely voluntary, but various groups such as Continua and AAMI (Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation) have praised this ‘first step’, and being published, it is now open for comment.

According to the Continua LinkedIn group announcement from Executive Director Chuck Parker, the 25 standards can be grouped into three categories:

  1. Risk management standards for a connected and networked environment
  2. Interoperability standards that establish nomenclature, frameworks and medical device specific communications and including system and software lifecycle processes
  3. Cyber security standards from the industrial control area most relevant to medical devices.

As the FierceHealthIT article cited, interoperability failure is a top 10 health technology hazard according to the ECRI Institute.  One can hope the new standards can be applied retroactively to current devices which are not being patched and updated because manufacturers fear running afoul of FDA clearance regulations and counter that ‘discouragement’. [TTA 8 AugAAMI News, Federal Register 6 August, FDA Voice (blog article by Bakul Patel)