Apr 4
2016
Responsible Design of Health Technology
Guest post by Gillian Christie, health innovation analyst, Vitality.
An era of self-quantification of health behaviors using technology is emerging outside of the doctor’s office. Consumer-facing health technologies empower individuals to monitor their health in real-time, employers to understand the health of their workforce, and researchers to uncover health trends across geographies. Eventually, the data from these technologies will re-enter the hospital setting by linking to our electronic medical records.
Deluges of data are rapidly being generated by these technologies. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the past two years. IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, indicates that data is the “next natural resource.” But how are these data protected and secured?
In the United States, laws have historically protected consumers from the misuse or abuse of their medical information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) have protected medical data from inappropriate uses. Data generated by consumer-facing health technologies, however, are not covered by these Acts. Companies can use the data for their own purposes. This means that companies must be ever more vigilant in ensuring the trust of their consumers through their data practices.
How can we collaborate across sectors to maintain and enhance trust? As a start, Vitality, Microsoft and the Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego, published an open-access, peer-reviewed commentary that outlined ethical, legal and social concerns associated with emerging health technologies. The call to action was for guidelines to be developed through a consultative process on the responsible innovation of these technologies and the appropriate stewardship of data from the devices. Between July and October 2015, we hosted a global public consultation to identify best practices. On Mar. 2, 2016, at HIMSS, we released the finalized guidelines for personalized health technology. They include five recommendations: