Summary
Summary Background: Mobile health Applications (mHealth Apps) are opening the way to patients’ responsible
and active involvement with their own healthcare management. However, apart from Apps
allowing patient’s access to their electronic health records (EHRs), mHealth Apps
are currently developed as dedicated “island systems”.
Objective: Although much work has been done on patient’s access to EHRs, transfer of information
from mHealth Apps to EHR systems is still low. This study proposes a standards-based
architecture that can be adopted by mHealth Apps to exchange information with EHRs
to support better quality of care.
Methods: Following the definition of requirements for the EHR/mHealth App information exchange
recently proposed, and after reviewing current standards, we designed the architecture
for EHR/mHealth App integration. Then, as a case study, we modeled a system based
on the proposed architecture aimed to support home monitoring for congestive heart
failure patients. We simulated such process using, on the EHR side, OpenMRS, an open
source longitudinal EHR and, on the mHealth App side, the iOS platform.
Results: The integration architecture was based on the bi-directional exchange of standard
documents (clinical document architecture rel2 – CDA2). In the process, the clinician
“prescribes” the home monitoring procedures by creating a CDA2 prescription in the
EHR that is sent, encrypted and de-identified, to the mHealth App to create the monitoring
calendar. At the scheduled time, the App alerts the patient to start the monitoring.
After the measurements are done, the App generates a structured CDA2-compliant monitoring
report and sends it to the EHR, thus avoiding local storage.
Conclusions: The proposed architecture, even if validated only in a simulation environment, represents
a step forward in the integration of personal mHealth Apps into the larger health-IT
ecosystem, allowing the bi-directional data exchange between patients and healthcare
professionals, supporting the patient’s engagement in self-management and self-care.
Citation: Marceglia S, Fontelo P, Rossi E, Ackerman MJ. A Standards-Based Architecture Proposal
for Integrating Patient mHealth Apps to Electronic Health Record Systems. Appl Clin
Inform 2015;6: 488–505
http://dx.doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2014-12-RA-0115
Keywords
Mobile health - delivery of health - heart failure