Personal Connected Health

Overview

The IHE Personal Connected Health (PCH) Program is a program under the IHE Devices (DEV) Domain. The PCH Program supports those device-related harmonization activities that are required for seamless integration between the clinical and consumer environments. The PCH Program also coordinates with other Programs of the DEV Domain, which include the Patient Care Device (PCD) and Device Point-of-Care Interoperability (DPi) Programs.

Mission

Provide industry resources to guide development, implementation and conformance assessment of personal connected health devices and apps to manage measurements of personal health and make them available to health information systems and exchanges.

Vision

The Personal Connected Health Program promotes the development of IHE Profiles for remote health and fitness monitoring in support of consumer-centered approach to improving their health and wellness. PCH Profiles provide guidance for implementing globally recognized standards that enable collection and sharing of massive amounts of medical-grade personal health data.

History

The Personal Connected Health Program was created in 2019 as part of an effort to broaden the scope of the IHE Patient Care Device Domain (now the IHE Devices (DEV) Domain) to include personal connected health outside the clinical environment. IHE entered into a cooperative agreement with the Personal Connected Health Alliance (PCHA) to leverage their experiences and expertise in personal connected health and remote patient monitoring. More specifically, the early profiles are based on the PCHA Continua Design Guidelines that provide the only secure end-to-end information & communication technology solution for personal connected health and care using open standards.

Committees

The PCH Program has a combined PCH Planning & Technical Committee that meets regularly to address both planning and technical issues.

Target Market

PCH recognizes a broad ecosystem to ensure it brings value-add to stakeholders with diverse user perspectives, use case scenarios and requirements. Key stakeholders include healthcare providers and insurance companies, remote care system integrators, medical technology and pharmaceutical companies.

It empowers healthcare providers and insurance companies to achieve outcomes at lower costs through outsourced population management services. It enables remote care service companies to draw upon IHE profiles to integrate the information & communication technology (ICT) systems essential to realizing these lower costs. It makes possible for device and sensor companies the means to furnish the meaningful observations that enable these ICT systems to deliver vital signs data captured from multiple sources by people at home and on the move. It provides pharmaceutical companies with the means to better measure drug efficacy.

Program Projects

The PCH Program currently has several activities that address the following:

Abstract information COntent Model (ACOM) – The collaboration with the IEEE 11073 PHD WG to create the IEEE 11073-10206 standard: a stand-alone simplified information model independent of transport that directly maps to HL7 FHIR.
Generic Health Sensor (GHS) – The collaboration with the Bluetooth SIG Medical Devices WG to create a service and profile specifications to provide a means of communicating a wide range of ACOM-based health-related observations from a health sensor device to a collector (that may act as a personal health gateway).

Test & Tools – The development of test and verification tools and processes to foster compliance with the relevant IHE Profiles.
Self-Measured Blood Pressure (SMBP) to Manage Hypertension – The development of an IHE profile that links patient-generated health data to clinician designed workflows to meet the specific needs of the patient and primary care team in the self-management and shared decision making of SMBP for Hypertension while providing evidence of improved outcomes without increasing staff burden.
Automatic Linking of Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) into Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROM) – The development of an IHE profile that makes PGHD actionable within clinical workflows while providing evidence of improved patient outcomes without increasing staff burden. More specifically, it provides a method for interlinking questionnaires and measurements used for home monitoring of patients delivering patient-reported outcomes (PROM) and/or enrolled in a remote patient monitoring (RPM) program.
CDG evolution/maintenance – Evolving and maintaining the Continua Design Guidelines.
Backlog projects – currently SUSPENDED activities:
- Direct-to-Cloud (D2C) Constrained Devices - The development of implementation guidance, in form of a new IHE Devices profile, for uploading ACOM-based health-related observations from a compute-constrained health sensor device directly to a health & fitness server. The upload is done via cellular Internet of Things (IoT) and zero-touch configuration (no Bluetooth or WiFi pairing).
- Mobile health apps - The development of profiles that foster a singular domain in which to coordinate the development of implementation guidelines to help patient and consumer facing application developers employ IHE profiles to apply the HL7 FHIR and other standards for the purpose of moving data between personal mobile devices and applications, and health information systems and exchanges.
- RPM Profile update
- Finalizing work on questionnaires

The PCH Program has more projects awaiting resources.

Overview slide deck on the first two activities: File:IHE-PCHA-IEEE-ACOM Overview 2020-12-23.pptx

PCH Profiles

The PCH Program is developing the following IHE Profiles:

Personal Health Device Observation Upload (POU) Profile – Describes a standardized means of representing personal healthcare device (PHD) data as FHIR resources. PHDs are typically used by patients at home. The POU Profile is anticipated to supplement any IHE profile or activity requiring a patient to use PHDs.

Contact

To learn more about the PCH Program, please contact the Program Secretary at pch@ihe.net.

Domains

Domain Coordination Committee