By David Haddad, program manager of Open mHealth

This week, as a member of the Open mHealth team, I will be at the mHealth Summit to showcase our work enabling integrated mHealth solutions that patients and providers can use to track and improve their health. At a special panel session, we will hear from two patients about how they have used integrated mHealth technology to manage their health.

One of those patients is Alex Freeman, who was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 4 and is now a pediatric acute care nurse at UCLA’s Mattel Children’s Hospital. Before the event, I spoke with Alex about her experiences using mHealth to manage her diabetes. The data integration allows her to pull in weight, blood glucose, and insulin data from a number of different mHealth self-service resources, such as:

• Entra and the Qualcomm, for tracking blood glucose and weight, via the 2Net cloud integration
• RunKeeper, for tracking exercise
• PAM for tracking mood
• BodyMedia for sleep data and calorie counting
• ohmage for integrating data

By David Haddad, program manager of Open mHealth

Next week, Pioneer grantee Open mHealth will showcase its work during the 2012 mHealth Summit in Washington, D.C. at a panel with co-founder Deborah Estrin on Monday and an “Open mHealth” special session on Tuesday.

What Is an Open Architecture?

Open architecture is software with source code that is freely available to developers to promote cooperation and interoperability (as opposed to proprietary and copyrighted software). This means developers can more quickly and effectively work together to create optimized mHealth applications.

What Is Open mHealth, and Why Is It Important?

Nine out of 10 people on the planet own a cell phone—making it more common than owning a car, radio, or television. Mobile health (mHealth) apps are increasingly popular—with one in five smartphone users having a health app. We can use apps on our phones to help us stay healthy. Apps like epocrates allow us to find health information and learn about medicine; other apps can help us collect and share data about our health with our health care providers.

By the Open mHealth team

Note: This was cross-posted from the Open mHealth blog.

Open mHealth is proud to announce that we’re going to the 2012 mHealth Summit on December 3-5, in Washington, D.C. We’re going to be showcasing the power of integration using an open architecture across two disease domains—type 1 Diabetes and post-traumatic Stress disorder (PTSD). We’ll be co-hosting a booth with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and 12 different technical partners, which represents a new level of collaboration in mHealth.

We’ve partnered with, and will be featuring, at the Summit: Alex Freeman (a patient with type 1 diabetes), Brian Venerick (a veteran with PTSD), Bodymedia, Runkeeper, Greendot Diabetes, Entra, Qualcomm Life’s 2Net, the Interaction Design Lab at Cornell University, Kaiser Permanente, Intel, Microsoft’s Health Vault, Ginger.io, Veteran Affairs’ National Center for PTSD, and Ohmage.

Today at the World Health Care Congress, Pioneer's Team Director Brian Quinn announced the winners of the Innovations for Health: Solutions that Cross Borders competition, supported by Pioneer and Ashoka Changemakers.  Innovations for Health looked to the international health community for forward-facing, transformative ideas with the potential to change health and medicine here in the United States.

We wanted to find cutting-edge solutions from anywhere in the world that have the potential to be applied in other countries to improve health and health care. While the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is devoted to improving the health and health care of Americans, this competition arises from what we call our “Flat World” work. That is the name we’ve given to our efforts that look around the world for innovations that could be used to solve the health and health care challenges we’re facing here in the United States.

Last year, the Pioneer portfolio partnered with Ashoka Changemakers to launch the Innovations for Health: Solutions that Cross Borders competition to find health care solutions from anywhere in the world that have the potential to be applied in other countries to improve health and health care.

After nearly 400 entries from 73 countries, we’re pleased to announce the finalists, and share a blog post with more details from Ashoka Changemakers. Stay tuned for the winners announcement on April 16!