Mobile Health is an emerging and rapidly developing field: with around 100,000 mHealth apps currently available across multiple platforms on the global market. It has the potential to play a part in the transformation of healthcare and increase its quality and efficiency. It can contribute to the empowerment of patients: allowing them to manage their health more actively, live more independently thanks to self-assessment or remote monitoring solutions. mHealth can also support healthcare professionals in treating patients more efficiently as mobile apps can encourage adherence to a healthy lifestyle.
However the large number of lifestyle and wellbeing apps available with no clear evidence on their quality and reliability is raising concerns. Customers may find it difficult to assess their usefulness, and this could limit their effective uptake for the benefit of public health. Ensuring quality of data is also essential for linking apps to the electronic health records and for the effective uptake in clinical practice.
In two open stakeholder meetings held by the European Commission following their Green Paper consultation, stakeholders confirmed that it would be useful to work on common assessment methodologies for mHealth. The European Commission launched a call for expression of interest to appoint members of a working group on mobile health (mHealth) assessment guidelines. The mandate of the group is to develop guidelines for assessing the validity and reliability of the data that health apps collect and process.
As mHealth has a great potential to improve life for millions of Europeans with asthma, allergy and COPD EFA applied for membership of the working group in order to ensure that patients’ views were kept to the forefront in the development of the guidelines. We are pleased to announce that our organisation’s application has been successful, due to our experience in the area of mHealth. Project Manager Giuseppe De Carlo will represent EFA in the working group.
The first meeting of the group is scheduled for February 2016 and we look forward to updating you on the project throughout 2016.