Standards development of mHealth at a glance

Background: Mobile health (mHealth) refers to the use of mobile communications technology and smart devices such as mobile phones, laptops, tablets and so on to provide healthcare solutions. This technology may be used for prevention, diagnosis, treatment or medical follow-up in healthcare area. Smart devices help health organizations to provide essential care and health information anytime, anywhere through information and telecommunications technologies. In this way, development and implementation of smart devices are rapidly progressing around the world. Recent development of smart devices where the patients’ information are stored and distributed securely requires a robust and compatible architecture to be able to manage the mobile data effectively. Objectives: The rapid changes in technology and adoption behaviors, jointly with the many proprietary systems that are hard to integrate, raise multi-layered interoperability issues. To support innovation and successful development of mHealth, agreement on interoperability needs to be established. This interoperability means that there must be a common understanding of the data elements, structures and terminology used in the mobile and health IT space, so this interoperability requires standards to be effective. Materials/Patients and Methods: mHealth is a broad field and no single standards organization encompasses the entire field. There are some international standards organizations that are at the forefront of interoperable healthcare mobile standards development. These include Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), Health Level 7 (HL7) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO). IHE and HL7 in particular are the leading standards developers for healthcare information interoperability, messaging and architecture. The mentioned organizations are not an exhaustive list of standards organizations doing work in various e-health areas, but they are the most high-profile organizations Results: This paper provides a survey which introduced the standard bodies and organizations working specifically in e-health standards and highlights considerable applied standards for the E-health mobile applications. It is clear that the issues identified in the development of standards have an impact on the adoption, conformance and compliance in such a diverse range of standards. These standards ensure systems and software products are safe, valid and meet quality parameters according to accepted standards.