Smart Personal Health:
New European effort to promote personal tools for health and wellness

A plethora of devices and applications, some converging from the consumer electronics world, are coming onto the market, many recommended by doctors and health insurers to help people monitor their health and wellness. These "personal health systems" (PHS) are a key element of growth of eHealth in Europe. Their full benefit can only be realised if they are interoperable - that is, if a device from one vendor works easily and seamlessly together with another and other eHealth applications.

In order to let Europe reap the full benefit of personal health systems, stakeholders must understand and support the range of challenges in personal health systems interoperability, from technical to organisational and legal aspects.

The European Commission has called for action to support a wider understanding of interoperability amongst key stakeholders, and has funded a Support Action to promote interoperability among personal health systems and to other eHealth systems. The project SmartPersonalHealth started on 1 January 2010 and will run for one year.

Key activities of SmartPersonalHealth will include three thematically focused regional stakeholder workshops and one central pan-European PHS Interoperability Conference. Further networking and dialogue with healthcare providers, patients, industry, insurers, standard development organisations will be carried out. The Continua Health Alliance web portal will provide relevant information. The workshops and related networking will result in a report addressed to the European Commission highlighting the current status, concerns, barriers and incentives to accelerate the development and adoption of interoperable PHS systems. Recommendations for interoperability promotion will be proposed to the EC, national governments, stakeholder groups and industry.

Partners are Continua, the global industry consortium to promote the interoperability of PHS devices and systems, ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, responsible for standardization of ICT within Europe, IHE, worldwide reference organisation for the interoperability of healthcare information systems and devices, empirica, a European research institute with a broad understanding of political, business and socio-economic issues surrounding eServices and telematics applications, coordinated by The Centre, a think-do-tank with expertise in project coordination, EU policies and regulation, events organization, and communication.

For more information contact us at simon.wilson@thecentre.eu.