New Health Tech Initiative to Enable Digital Health Record Access for Android Users

A group of healthcare and technology organizations is leading an initiative that will aim to create an open-source system so that Android phone users can access and share their digital health data.

The model will look to follow Apple’s approach, whose Health Records platform—launched early in 2018, and which is already live at hundreds of hospitals and clinics—allows patients who visit participating providers to access their health data on the iPhone Health app.  

The participating organizations in the initiative—Cornell Tech, UC San Francisco (UCSF), Sage Bionetworks, Open mHealth and The Commons Project—are collaborating to develop CommonHealth, an open-source, non-profit public service designed to make it easy and secure for people to collect their electronic health record (EHR) data and share it with health apps and partners that have demonstrated their trustworthiness.

CommonHealth will leverage data interoperability standards, including HL7 FHIR to offer functionality analogous to Apple Health to users of Android phones, officials said in an announcement.

"Apple has shown real leadership and moved the industry forward by enabling patient access to their health information. Now CommonHealth is significantly expanding the number of people who can benefit from easy electronic access to their health records," said JP Pollak, the CommonHealth product lead, senior researcher in residence at Cornell Tech and assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The CommonHealth partners are implementing what they call a “robust governance model that will review and approve all apps and partners connecting to CommonHealth.”

The personal health data aggregated through CommonHealth may also be used to improve digital therapeutics and diagnostics, biomedical research, and patient care, as described by UCSF Professor of Medicine Ida Sim in a recent New England Journal of Medicine article.

CommonHealth is being piloted at UCSF and select academic medical centers and health systems.

"The upcoming launch of CommonHealth will unlock a wealth of opportunities for the developer and research communities, helping them to conduct more inclusive studies and deliver personal health management tools," said Deborah Estrin, associate dean for impact at Cornell Tech and co-founder of Open mHealth.