Building Personal Connected Health

Interoperable and connected health devices are ideal for managing chronic diseases but integrated data flow, interoperability, encoding the data over the channel and the reduction of developments costs are some of the major challenges connected to eHealth. Today it is evident for all the participants in the process that the integration of data and personal medical information can open new solutions for the control of chronic diseases such as diabetes. As reported by the World Health Organization report, circa 75-85% of healthcare spending is on chronic disease management, so that can easily explain why in this field there are a variety of standardization organizations and why this has the direct consequence of the lack of communication and interoperability for eHealth. There are a variety of economical and political factors going on in this sector, and everyone wants to be a winner instead of a simple savior. In the process of building personal connected health care systems, with a mission of promoting connected and interoperable devices an international organization is predominant today: Continua Health Alliance is the principal international industry organization enabling security, connectivity and empowerment of health devices, thus making the eHealth somehow far from being just an idea.

Continua Health Alliance is an international not-for-profit industry organization working to ensure interoperability for connected personal medical devices and services, focused on establishing systems of interoperable eHealth devices and services in three categories: chronic disease management, aging independently, and health and physical fitness. The vision that they have and that makes the entire process going on is that Interoperability is a challenge in connected health care that Continua is working to solve. Continua Health Alliance is basically a standards organization and by being oriented toward standardization and consequently on interoperability they try not to be innovative but all their effort is concentrated on creating interfaces and interoperability for a possible market adoption. Today, a variety of other standardization organizations are trying to standardize eHealth products, so a question that comes to my mind is why exactly Continua Alliance is a major actor in this scene? The answer is not easy and it requires some explanations. I have already mentioned that Continua Health Alliance is an international non-profit industry consortium having today nearly 250 member companies around the world and it is continuing to grow up week after week. Thus, this is already an indicator of the proportions of this organization and it directly shows that if such a large number of companies are united into one organization for collaborating and working together then it is possible to create a marketplace for wireless health systems and from that derive the standards and interoperability solutions. If you wish to have a view of all the participating members companies and principally a list of Promoter Members you can take a look at the picture bellow:

   

Continua was formed in June 2006 and just recently celebrated their 6 years of activity and success, and when I say success believe me, it is real success: Continua is not simply a standards organization providing guidelines and improving interoperability between a variety of devices, but they involve themselves in other regulatory standards bodies, and they are focused on removing the marketplace barriers by collaborating with some of the principal companies such as Microsoft, Nokia and Sony, just to name few of them.
The technology platforms are defined by the company members, that are “leaders” of their own product since the development of the specific device is independent for each company. The next step is the publication of Continua’s guidelines and certifications focused on establishing interoperability and connectivity of these products and finally aiming at making them all work together. I already mentioned the problem of market barriers for personalized healthcare: knowing that the fast market adoption is not uncomplicated, the Continua organization in addition to the publication of guidelines, takes care also of the market activities and policy by collaborating with the governments in order to remove barriers and to spread the marketplace for personalized healthcare solutions for the technical, regulatory and financial aspects of the process. To build a system of interoperable health care solutions, first Continua's member companies will select connectivity standards and publish guidelines about how to achieve interoperability, afterwards the process requires the establishments of tests and certification.

The products that are certified with a recognizable Continua logo are certified to work and to be interoperable with any other Continua product already certified. In my opinion this is what really make this organization excellent and predominant in this scenario: Continua’s standards framework removes barriers so everyone can produce their products, mixing them with other wireless devices focused on end-to-end and plug-and-play connectivity for a system of connected health devices. In a technically, financially and regulatory complicated system as it is the eHealth system, this can only be achieved when the various market players and companies collaborate in a major organization as it is Continua, for introducing innovation and technology to personalized health care. This is the value of Continua’s Health Alliance to eHealth development.