connected health – AQuAS Blog

Is assessment still the pending issue of health apps?

22 Mar

An article in JAMA has recently been published presenting the first smart watch approved by the FDA to predict epileptic seizures. It is called Embrace, a connected device which detects seizures linked to movement and electric fluctuations in the skin of a person and sends an alert so they can receive medical attention.

Last February, the Mobile World Congress was held in Barcelona. Among the different activities to be highlighted which are organised around this congress there is one called 4 Years From Now (#4YFN18), the part of the Mobile which connects companies, investors and institutions with each other to encourage collaboration in developing different ideas, business models and technological solutions.

The Digital Health & Wellness Summit 2018, organised by 4YFN Connecting Startups, the Mobile World Capital Barcelona and the Mobile World Congress with the collaboration of ECHAlliance, the European Connected Health Alliance, is the meeting point of technological and health issues. This year, among others, Neil Gomes, Maria Salido and Elena Torrente participated.

Neil Gomes from the Thomas Jefferson University of the USA pointed out that one of the challenges in mHealth is facilitating feedback between patients and health professionals.

Maria Salido, co-founder and CEO of the health app, SocialDiabetes, raised key issues for success with health apps: regulation + industry + users. And in particular, she highlighted the importance of the final users. An article published in The Economist was much commented on here with a provocative title:

Elena Torrente, Digital Health Coordinator at DKV, commented on Digital Doctor, a health app that incorporates a detector of symptoms and a tool to request a doctor’s appointment. She pointed out that there were more women than men in the user profile of the app.

In general, there was consensus on the fact that prior to developing an app, an analysis to identify needs must be done. That is, the first step should be to detect the needs of a user and then, based on the mapping of these needs, the moment would come to develop technological solutions.

The content of all these presentations is available and you can also read a compilation of the main ideas that were highlighted here and here.

Despite it not being the main subject of their presentations, in the follow up debate the need and convenience of assessment was brought up. At present, there are already 320,000 health apps on the market. But,… How are they assessed? Who does this? With what criteria? Can we already talk about the safe prescription of health apps?

We close the circle once again with the conceptual framework of mHealth Assessment published in JMIR mHealth and uHealth with which the Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia (AQuAS) provides the culture of assessment to the everyday reality in which we find ourselves (in 2016 it was published in the first quartile, in the categories “Health Care Sciences & Services” and “Medical Informatics”, respectively, in the Journal Citation Reports). There are an increasing number of health apps and the debate concerning their assessment remains open.

Post written by Marta Millaret (@MartaMillaret).

PEGASO: Fit For Future: connected health and long-term strategy

16 Nov

Developing a platform based on mHealth that has mobile applications (apps), a game and intelligent sensors has been the goal of the European project PEGASO Fit For Future, which began in December 2013 and ended last July.

It is a platform that aims to improve both the lifestyles of adolescents (diet, physical activity and hours of sleep) and the knowledge that they might have about these life styles. To achieve this, intelligent sensors (t-shirt and bracelet) which record the physical activity and hours of sleep of an individual and also different apps which record the intake of food by means of a diary and footsteps taken by means of an accelerometer were developed and tested.

The PEGASO Fit For Future platform detects which lifestyles a user has and makes recommendations on how to improve them. In addition, it incorporates a gamification component: based on how healthy the lifestyle of a user is as well as how much their knowledge improves, which are then converted into obtaining a greater or lesser amount of points.

As an example, here we can see a screenshot of a fictitious user:

Professionals from different areas collaborated in the project: developers of games, apps and sensors, design and gaming experts, health professionals (doctors, nurses, experts in nutrition, experts in physical activity and psychologists) and also experts in health technology assessment and public health.

There were two different phases of the project: the development phase of the platform and the assessment phase.

During the development phase, while some professionals put their efforts into ensuring the quality and appropriateness of the medical and clinical content of the platform, others concentrated on aspects of a technological nature.

Nevertheless, the opinions of the end users themselves, adolescents, were always kept in mind during this process. In three iterative stages, boys and girls in Catalonia, Lombardy, England and Scotland tested this technology out in the different stages of its development.

The proposals for improvement made by the adolescents including their preferences were, whenever possible, kept in mind for the later versions of the platform. The aim was to guarantee as far as possible that what was being developed was practical for and accepted by the end users.

The last stage of the project was the assessment of the platform. The assessment of the different elements (apps, games and sensors) was to see if they really did help to improve the lifestyles and knowledge about lifestyles among adolescents and to assess the experience of the user after having used the platform.

To this end, a pilot study was carried out with adolescents from Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland and England in which 365 mobile phones with the PEGASO platform installed were used by adolescents.

After six months of use, the intervention was assessed by means of validated questionnaires, a qualitative methodology and data obtained from the platform itself. A control group was introduced allowing for comparisons to be made with adolescents that did not have access to the platform.

The results of this study will help to evaluate whether new technologies are practical in helping adolescents improve both their lifestyles and knowledge about these lifestyles, a population group accustomed to using new technologies and that, in general, do not often visit health professionals.

Getting closer to the population by using mobile technology and the recreational aspect of gaming could be a good strategy for an intervention of this type related to the promotion of healthy lifestyles among adolescents. At a population level, it is a long-term strategy and hence the slogan “Fit For Future” of the PEGASO project.

Post written by Elisa Puigdomènech.

Time to digitally disconnect?

14 Sep

It is very common to see groups of people looking at their mobile devices in any place at any time: on holiday, at work, at home, in the underground, on the bus, in a congress, ….. wherever. It is also common to take advantage of our holidays to say that we will make the most of these days to disconnect from our routines. Does this include disconnecting our mobile phones, tablets, laptops, the TV or email?

At AQuAS, as an agency involved in health assessment, we do not know this. What we do know is that there is more and more talk of connected health, a term which includes mHealth, eHealth and all related concepts, which have been a part of everyday life for some time now.

At a level of the Catalan system of health, we have in this post by Òscar Solans an example of the development of technological tools which involve new ways of interaction between patients and the health system. In this way, La Meva Salut and eConsult are useful tools when placing the patient, the person that is, at the centre of all the interactions there are with the health professionals coming from different fields.

At a European level, Jean Patrick Mathieu and Rossana Alessandrello wrote about how complex the subjects of interoperability and the implementation of mobile technological solutions are, in this other post. This was the framework for the European project DECIPHER whose goal was to facilitate the access to health information from different countries and health systems.

Let’s change the perspective. At an individual level, who does not have an app downloaded on their mobile phone? Which of these apps have to do with something related to health, such as weight control, for example, or as support when doing physical exercise, to keep track of menstrual cycles, fertility calendars or aspects of mental and emotional health? And no need to limit ourselves to talking about mobile devices: who has not heard of calculators for aspects of health such as calculators of life expectancy?

Downloading an app is very easy and can even be free. In this post by Elisa Puigdomènech, she highlighted the fact that in mid-2016 The Economist explained there were some 165,000 apps related to health. This figure must no doubt have increased.

What does the success of an app depend on? What guarantees of quality and safety do they offer?

Regarding the first question, the user experience was the subject on which Elisa Puigdomènech put the emphasis, based on the experience obtained in the PEGASO project. Along the same lines, Santi Gómez spoke about the fact that the development of a health application must, in all phases of its development, include the participation of those who will ultimately be the end users.

And in terms of the second question, any health intervention should be safe, be based on evidence, on the best quality knowledge available and should be assessable. This is the premise with which we at the AQuAS work and this is the role that an assessment agency can play when thinking about connected health. Thus, this post by Toni Dedéu places the emphasis on the fact that technologists, assessors, professionals and citizens have the opportunity to work together and combine their expertise but not forgetting the speed of innovation.

In conclusion, the assessment of connected health is a current topic. This article was recently published, and is a good example of a proposal for a conceptual framework. We end this post with an editorial about innovation and evidence which invites one to reflect on assessment and innovation.

Post written by Marta Millaret (@MartaMillaret)

The DECIPHER Project: from the interoperability to the procurement of innovation

8 Jun

In 2013 when Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries (AQuAS) relaunched the project DECIPHER (@DECIPHERpcpEU), we were pioneering in the field of Procurement of Innovation and little did we know on the journey ahead. The project proved to be a big challenge for the AQuAS, the Catalan Department of Health and the all consortium involved.

The European Commission Officers and the projects evaluators would also be faced with a new type of project and with the projects consortium and stakeholders, we all learned a lot in this exciting adventure.

The journey would end in March 2017 with the Barcelona final event, but the aftermath of the projects will definitely be felt in the years to come.

Rossana Alessandrello at the DECIPHER – FINAL EVENT (Barcelona 2017)

DECIPHER was a project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) under a call for project in 2011 whose topic was “Patient Guidance Services (PGS), safety and healthcare record information reuse”.

The objective of the project was to enable secure cross-border mobile access to existing patient healthcare portals which are individually supported by public bodies.

DECIPHER would deploy Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP) to create step-change innovations in mobile patient ICTs. Using electronic patient records as the key enabling technology, this joint PCP would create technology-led service transformation in cross-border mobile healthcare, delivering qualitative and significant benefits to patients and healthcare organisations.

The Consortium consisted of ESTAR Centro (Tuscany), TicSalut (Catalonia) and CMFT (Manchester). Suppliers will be challenged to build on outputs from epSOS, CALLIOPE, and LOD2, and advances in mobile technology. Moreover, experts from Greece, France, Finland, UK, Sweden and Ireland will provide support.

DECIPHER will generate a portfolio of interoperable applications, deployed on a pan-European platform. This resource will improve existing healthcare services by supporting mobility of patients and healthcare providers.

As a use-case scenario, the solutions were to focus on patients with a chronic health condition and Diabetes type II was selected.

From anywhere in the European Union, a patient will be able to use a secure mobile device safely to gain 24/7 access to their prescription data, emergency data, examination results and other health information.

By the end of the project, 6 prototypes solutions were funded of which 3 finalists received full funding to develop a full final version. Although the respective national Personal Health Records (PHRs) systems of the three procuring authorities are not able to implement those solutions in their current state, the achievements are important for DECIPHER:

Invaluable experiences were gathered by all stakeholders involved in the project
SMEs from all over Europe came under the radar of potential clients, the public procuring authorities in the consortium and those who were interested on the project
AQuAS acquired an expertise in procurement of innovation that is now well-renowned in Europe and beyond.
The lessons learned will be applied in the new PCP project coordinated by AQuAs, Antisuperbugs.

DECIPHER project was initially designed to address the interoperability issue in the healthcare sector. But, this project has been fundamental in the development of a model of procurement of innovation useful for the set-up of this kind of project. With this objective in Catalonia, we consider DECIPHER as a case use where AQuAS lead the path with a set of toolkit, methodology and expertise.

Post written by Jean Patrick Mathieu.