Xcertia takes another pass at app certification, but will it fly? (US)

December 6, 2015 | by | 1 Comment

[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/alp-mountains-peaks-in-winter.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]An app developer and a healthcare/digital health innovation lab get into the certification game. Can they fly over the treacherous peaks this time? Social Wellth made good on their promise (or threat?) to get into the app vetting business this past week through announcing a partnership with Columbia University-based HITLAB at the HITLAB Summit this week to develop a certification organization known as Xcertia. Last year, Social Wellth acquired the remains of Happtique from GNYHA Ventures [TTA 12 Dec 14]. The Xcertia principles center around privacy, security, operability and content–as Happtique’s did. The intent is to not only develop a program to certify apps based on established standards, but also form a Signature Steering Committee to ensure they maintain “their definitive set of criteria for evaluating mobile health apps.” MedCityNews, release

Possible conflict of interest. It all sounds positive, but the head of Xcertia, David Vinson, is also the CEO of Social Wellth, which despite its nonprofit-ish name makes its living by developing consumer apps and “dashboards” for insurance companies, a task grandly called (from their press release) “the curation of digital health experiences by leveraging mobile health technologies that allow for integration and aggregation of all digital assets.” Social Wellth also makes quite a bit of hay on its website about app curation for its clients. (more…)

Health data changes Down Under: My Health Record, Tim Kelsey and Telstra

September 22, 2015 | by

Australia’s federal government is hoping for a boost to its national personal health records system, starting with a renaming of Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) to My Health Record. Proposed in the government’s $485 million budget announcement on eHealth is a resolution of implementation issues and introducing trials of participation models including designing opt-out approaches. Currently enrollment stands at a paltry 10 percent of Australians. Computer World (Australia) Hat tip to Mike Clark via Twitter

Come December, also taking the long trip there will be NHS England national director for patients and information Tim Kelsey to join Telstra Health as commercial director. Telstra is Australia’s largest telecom developing a footprint in health, and earlier this year acquired Dr Foster LLP, the UK-based health informatics company. Coincidentally (?), Mr Kelsey co-founded Dr Foster prior to 2006, when he joined the NHS to start up the information site NHS Choices. During his NHS tenure, Mr Kelsey faced numerous controversies which are detailed in the Guardian and IT news/opinion site The Register reports, mainly concerning the Care.data database for all English medical records. Concerns were raised about inadequate privacy, transparency and confidentiality provision in its design, and after a halt it has still not restarted, although 1 million people have preemptively opted out–another issue in common with My Health Record. According to the Guardian, “The scheme was recently labelled “unachievable” by a Whitehall watchdog, the Major Projects Authority, which said the future of the programme should be reassessed.” A successor to Mr Kelsey has not yet been named.

NHS Apps Library embraces mental health…and Mole Detective vanishes

March 24, 2015 | by

Thanks to Mike Clark for pointing this editor to the breaking news that the NHS Mental Health Apps Library has now gone live. It features online tools, resources and apps that they claim have a proven track record of effectiveness in improving mental health outcomes.

It is accessible through the NHS Choices platform, a website that gathers over 40 million visits per month, 9.7 million of which are to pages on depression; 6 million per month to stress and 9.4 million to anxiety.

This is likely to be a major benefit to those who have difficulty obtaining access to face:face mental health services, especially as a number of presentations in the Royal Society of Medicine have suggested that online mental health services can often be more effective (more…)