CommonHealth Will Enable Android™ Phone Users to Access and Share their Electronic Health Record Data with Trusted Apps and Partners

NEW YORK, Sept. 5, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — 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 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.  

“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 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 today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

To ensure patient privacy and promote trust, the CommonHealth partners are implementing a robust governance model that will review and approve all apps and partners connecting to CommonHealth.

“UCSF is committed to using technology to improve care for all of our patients,” said Russ Cucina, Chief Health Information Officer for UCSF Health. “The CommonHealth project will ensure that more of our patients have access to their health information, and that they can share it responsibly with the growing health technology sector.”

“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.

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

Academic medical centers and health systems interested in applying to participate as a CommonHealth pilot site or developers seeking early API access should contact partner@commonhealth.org.

About The Commons Project
The Commons Project Foundation (TCP) is a non-profit organization established to build and operate digital services for public good. TCP was founded with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. (www.thecommonsproject.org)

About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals, as well as affiliations throughout the Bay Area. (www.ucsf.edu and Fact Sheet).

About Cornell Tech
Cornell Tech’s degree programs and research initiatives provide responsive approaches to the rapid emergence of technologies and their societal impact in the digital age. Cornell Tech offers seven doctoral programs and seven master’s programs, including two dual-degree programs with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology through the Jacobs Cornell-Technion Institute. Cornell Tech’s world-class faculty, graduate students, researchers, and postdoctoral entrepreneurs are focused on building better tuned, highly valuable and more accessible technology for commercial and community use. (www.tech.cornell.edu)

About Open mHealth
Open mHealth is a non-profit making patient-generated health data more accessible with an open data format. Through community and software tools, our data standard helps developers normalize data coming from disparate data sources like wearables and EHR data so it can make sense to the clinical world.  (www.openmhealth.org)

About SageBionetworks
Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research and technology development organization. We apply open practices to data-driven research for the advancement of human health. Our interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers provides researchers access to technology tools and scientific approaches to share data, benchmark methods, and explore collective insights, all backed by Sage’s gold-standard governance protocols and commitment to user-centered design. (www.sagebionetworks.org)

Android is a trademark of Google LLC.

Contact:  press@commonhealth.org

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SOURCE The Commons Project