Blog Post Submitted by ForgeRock

Technology and health leaders Arm, ForgeRock, Philips, and Qualcomm Life, along with innovative healthcare startups Sparsa and US TrustedCare, today announced a collaborative effort focused on enhancing data from medical devices to enable more trustworthy data sourcing and consented patient-information sharing. Under the banner “OpenMedReady,” the companies have created a framework designed to complement existing standards in remote clinical care by addressing five critical areas in remote patient monitoring: patient identity, device identity, data integrity, patient privacy, and consent.

As a part of the framework, OpenMedReady will utilize capabilities such as fingerprint biometrics, available in many smartphones, with connected medical sensors to add patient identity into data stream. The framework also includes device identity, which ensures that clinicians are aware of the actual device from which a reading was taken, helping to connect patient to device for data transparency and clarity. Making use of these capabilities brings traceability and auditability to remote patient data, and enables securely binding that data with dynamic patient consent. The framework is designed to be readily implementable by telecare service providers and medical device vendors for improved clinical decision making. More on this collaboration will be unveiled at the HLTH – The Future of Health Conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, May 6th, during the general session talk at 5:05pm on Advancing the State of Digital Health with Dr. James Mault, Sr. Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Qualcomm Life.

Most healthcare industry initiatives related to remote patient monitoring have focused on connectivity standards such as Bluetooth, EHR data standards (such as IEEE and HL7 FHIR) and health data exchange frameworks, such as the Continua Design Guidelines. OpenMedReady will complement these important building blocks by adding assurances to physicians about the authenticity and integrity of the measured data, with a goal to increase trust in remotely gathered patient data. Ultimately, trustworthy and secure remote patient data can help lower costs across the healthcare industry and lower hospital readmission rates.

“Historically, clinicians have been reluctant to use remote patient data for clinical decision making due in part to the concerns regarding identity management, consent and data integrity,” noted James Mault, MD, FACS, senior vice president and chief medical officer at Qualcomm Life, subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, and a leader in powering intelligent, connected care. “OpenMedReady combines connected sensors with modern smartphone capabilities to provide doctors a cryptographic log of a patient’s identity, their device’s identity, and their consent, giving care teams the confidence they need to treat patients based on data acquired remotely.”

“At a time when research shows 87% of patients are unwilling to comprehensively divulge all medical information due to privacy and security issues, it’s critical to establish a proper trust relationship among patients, care providers, telecare devices, and digital services,” said Eve Maler, vice president of innovation and emerging technology, ForgeRock. “The two critical pieces in doing this are authenticated identity and consent management. The OpenMedReady framework promises a method for doing this in a way that lets valuable ecosystems grow.”

Ramkrishna Prakash, CEO of US TrustedCare, added that “OpenMedReady is an essential building block for enabling effective accountable care, and will serve as a valuable component for providers engaged in shared savings and risk contracts. We are excited to participate in the design of this framework to enable such an open solution for the healthcare and wellness industry.”

“Future remote patient analytics platforms will employ artificial intelligence (AI) for greater data accuracy, speed, and scale in managing outcomes of large patient populations,” said Karthik Ranjan, director of healthcare strategy at Arm. “OpenMedReady enhances remotely acquired data by increasing its’ provenance, bringing us closer to the reality of closed loop health systems. Automatically reacting to a patients condition and orchestrating the right response will help to avoid costly hospitalization and doctor visits while reducing billions of dollars from the healthcare system.”