International presence of the mHealth.cat Office and the Portal AppSalut

Fundació TicSalut’s mHealth.cat Office was presented on the past 3 and 4 of May at end of the two sessions organised by the European Commission in Brussels. On the 3^rd, the meeting of the workgroup was held, which was formed by different countries, Catalonia amongst them, where work is being done on defining the directives for assessing and validating the reliability of mobile applications in health and social welfare. The first draft of these guidelines was published on the past 25 April 2016, where the intention is to establish a common set of criteria regarding quality, safety, reliability and efficiency to give support in the methodologies that can be used to assess applications in the health and social areas. However, once approved, the directives will be voluntary, but they are important to guide good practices in the development of mobile applications in the health and social areas and to instil confidence amongst health professionals so that they might be used as an integral part of the treatment process.

The meeting on the 3rd focused on joint work on presenting the draft which the next day was to be presented to 80 stakeholders from different countries. At the meeting on the 4th with the parties concerned, the mentioned draft was shown, discussion themes were opened up and the subjects still on the drawing board were presented so that good practices could be brought in on subjects related to the accreditation of mobile applications from the countries themselves. They were also asked, in order to facilitate feedback, to complete an online questionnaire designed by the European Commission to collect their contributions for assessment in the workgroup.

The Catalan model, an example of good practices

One point where Catalonia was able to provide a lot of information thanks to the good practices being applied with the Portal AppSalut project and the process of certifying apps, is the evaluation methodology and the criteria of certification that have been defined. In this sense, the guidelines divide the assessment of an mHealth Application into three phases: (I) A first phase of an initial assessment of the application; a (II) second phase of evaluation of the risk to determine the required scrutiny; and a (III) third phase in which the scrutiny is performed where a series of questions are made, bearing in mind the technological application and the medical aspects of the application that have to be considered when assessing an application.

During this year, another three documents will be presented, and for late 2016 or early 2017 the first evaluation guidelines of Health and Social Applications are expected to be made public. Fundació TicSalut will present the project of good practices on which work is currently under way.

3 months of the mHealth.cat Office

On 15 June, the Fundació TicSalut’s mHealth.cat Office celebrated 3 months of its presentation during the mHealth.cat Meeting in Barcelona. In these months, the APPs Observatory has gone from having 168 published APPs to having 203, the majority of these new APPs being Catalan.

The mHealth.cat Office is mainly intended to drive and implement the Master Mobility Plan promoted by the department of Health Social Affairs and Family. It is intended to bring citizens closer to the healthcare and social services through mobility technologies, by encouraging the deployment of applications and mobility projects in the country.

Throughout this time in operation, interest has been detected on the part of the developers in certifying their Health and social APPs. Although the requirements to be able to access the APPSalut water will not be made public until the presentation of the portal on Monday 20, the developers are showing interest in knowing what the certification criteria are in order to be present. 

Similarly, the other more habitual consultations that have been received are those referring to contacting other profiles with whom to collaborate in making mobility projects reality or having them known in the Catalan Health area. Some of the Catalan APPs will be presented at the 6th TIC Health and Social R&D+i 2016 meetings to be held in Vic on the coming 29 and 30 September. You still have time until 25 June to send your reports if you want to take part!