The vision that physicians prescribing apps to patients will one day be mainstream practice has garnered a lot of interest. Groups from the public and private sectors have offered different approaches to advancing this vision, albeit at a halting pace. That’s prompted this week’s announcement on the formation of Xcertia at the Connected Health conference — an initiative by a group of healthcare nonprofit groups to hammer out guidelines and best practices for mobile health apps.
The founding nonprofits include American Medical Association, American Heart Association, DHX Group and HIMSS.
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Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe Xcertia as a rebirth. The entity was initially launched one year ago by SocialWellth and HITLAB. The new vision for Xcertia, announced at the Connected Health conference this week, lacks the certification component and commercial angle of the program as it was presented last year. To add to the intrigue, David Vinson is the founder and CEO of SocialWellth and the founder and chairman of DHX Group.
A news release about Xcertia described the vision for the nonprofit’s membership and governing board as “open to representation from consumers, developers, payers, clinicians, academia and others with an interest in the development of guidelines for mobile health apps.”
In a phone interview with MedCity News, AMA Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Michael Hodgkins said it had been an interesting journey to bring the nonprofits together. He learned from Vinson that although Xcertia had been created, the entity had not been incorporated. Hodgkins noted that Xcertia fit nicely with what the AMA is doing in the mobile health space and Vinson had asked the AMA to become more involved. It made sense to the American Heart Association and HIMSS as well, said Hodgkins.
“This effort is to make publicly available a comprehensive framework of practices and principles so stakeholders can make better decisions on what constitutes a good app and be very transparent about that,” he said.
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Xcertia’s first priorities will be to decide on board members, a chairman of the board and to define the focus of the initial workgroups. The group hopes to have those decisions made by the annual HIMSS conference, set for February 19-23 next year.
Hodgkins offered up some ideas on some of the issues that the workgroups would wrestle with.
“How do we judge the strength of evidence that underlies a particular mobile health app? Is it accurate? What is the usability for consumers and patients? What’s the best way to evaluate efficacy? These are areas where there has been some work but not a lot of work.”
Hodgkins observed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has taken a largely hands-off approach when it comes to mobile health. Although he acknowledged that in the private sector Apple and Google are “pretty much the gatekeepers” of app development, (Apple came out with some guidelines for mobile health app developers earlier this year), Hodgkins said there was a need for more detailed guidelines for best practice.
Aside from Google and Apple, other stakeholders that Xcertia has reached out to are healthcare professionals, retail pharmacies, patients/consumers and other industry participants. He expects other nonprofits associated with patients to take part, in addition to the AHA.
“This is going to be a major initiative in the marketplace that we feel will have a great impact,” Hodgkins said.
The sheer diversity of healthcare industry stakeholders virtually guarantees that it will be a long process. Hodgkins acknowledged as much.
“When you’re trying to be inclusive, it makes things more complicated but we feel there needs to be a process that major stakeholders can buy into.”
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