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.

Health care is one of life’s most basic needs. It’s so simple. In recent years, though, the subject of health care has also served to polarize our nation. We all need it, but who’s responsible for making sure we get it? How do we ensure it’s safe, high-quality care? What about cost? Vocal, contentious debate over the answers to these questions—and many more—continues unabated in the United States. Meanwhile, in my work as a volunteer nurse at a clinic for the uninsured, I see patients who continue to lack the means to get even the most basic of care, who struggle with chronic disease in a system that seems to throw up obstacles at every turn.

That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news: Amidst the unproductive noise, countless innovators from all walks of life are quietly going about the work of solving some of the most intractable problems in health and health care. 

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.

By Patrick van der Valk, member of the Archimedes team

This blog entry was originally posted to HealthData.gov on October 29, 2012.

The Archimedes Healthcare Simulator (ARCHeS) is a Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) solution that provides health experts access to the Archimedes Model, via a web portal, to answer complex health care questions. The Archimedes Model is a full-scale computer simulation model of human physiology, diseases, behaviors, interventions and health care systems. Through advanced methods of mathematics, computing, and data systems, the Model enables users to run clinically realistic virtual trials that drive better decisions in health and economic outcomes research, comparative effectiveness research, and program and policy design and utilization.

ARCHeS (video and explanation), which launched in May 2011 under a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, allows users to run their own virtual trial by setting up populations, eligibility criteria, standard or custom interventions, and care processes. Users submit their query to the Archimedes Model through the ARCHeS Setup Tool to be queued for a simulation. The Model performs calculations to simulate each person in the population and delivers a dataset via the Archimedes Outcomes Analyzer (AOA) within 24 hours. The AOA allows users to see health and economic outcomes and explore different combinations of interventions and outcomes.

This December marks my first year with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and with the Pioneer Portfolio. Throughout the year, I’ve been amazed by the team’s connection to health and health care innovation, and have been humbled to be part of RWJF as it celebrates its 40th anniversary.

As part of its anniversary celebration, RWJF announced its inaugural Young Leader Awards. I was excited that RWJF chose to honor 10 leaders, 40 and under, who offer promise for leading the way to improved health and health care. The Foundation recently announced the 10 winners who represent great diversity in the future of health care innovation.