Overcoming the ‘Oceans of Data But Puddles of Information’ Problem with Patient-Generated Data
In October 2017 the American Medical Association (AMA) launched the Integrated Health Model Initiative (IHMI) with the goal of bringing together healthcare providers and health technology companies around common data models. At HIMSS19 in Orlando, Fla., IHMI has introduced a new data model to manage an uninterrupted stream of data from devices that remotely monitor blood pressure.
The model seeks to tap into health information that has often gone uncollected, unanalyzed, or unshared, opening potential to improve health outcomes, AMA said. Three medical technology companies have announced that they will be the first to adopt the new data portability model for blood pressure monitoring devices.
IHMI’s data model standardizes clinically relevant information for advanced blood pressure monitoring devices that improves the capture of clinically valid blood pressure data. AMA said the IHMI data model serves as a data portability standard used by devices to define what data to collect, select how to represent the collected data, and determine how to encode the data for easy transmission, exchange and retrieval.
“For too long, clinicians have struggled to navigate a landscape with oceans of data but puddles of information. The ability to harness patient-generated health data from a multitude of sources has come of age, and will empower patients and physicians to find and leverage meaningful data to improve health,” said IHMI Chief Medical Information Officer Tom Giannulli, M.D., M.S., in a prepared statement. “With the increase in healthcare consumerism, there is a critical need to enable data models that manage the collection and exchange of health data so patients and clinicians can make sense of it and rely on its clinical validity.”
The AMA said that following a clinical validation process, the Self-Measured Blood Pressure Data Model has moved into product integration with higi, a consumer health technology company with more than 10,000 smart health stations located across the United States, supporting 54 million unique users. Another mobile application developer, HealthSteps, is integrating content from the model into its mobile platform, and Cloud DX, a Canadian digital healthcare company, has finalized a product integration agreement.
