) A group of technology, healthcare and fitness companies on Tuesday announced the formation of an industry group that will agree on standards to allow healthcare and medical devices to interconnect. The goal is to allow patients to receive care or advice outside the traditional healthcare setting.
Founding members of the Continua Health Alliance include GE Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Medtronic, Motorola, Nonin, Omron Healthcare, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric), Partners HealthCare, Polar Electro, Royal Philips Electronics, RMD Networks, Samsung Electronics, Sharp, The Tunstall Group, Welch Allynm Zensys. BodyMediam, Cisco Systems, IBM and Intel.
The group will focus on chronic disease management, monitoring for the elderly and health and fitness. For example, standards could address how devices such as weight scales or pedometers to transmit information through a computer or cell phone to a nutritionist. In another scenerio, devices to monitor a chronic condition could connect to a home network. The elderly could live independtly for longer with the help of sensors placed in the home, David Whitlinger, chairman of the Continua Health Alliance and director of Healthcare Device Standards in Intel’s Digital Health Group, told Healthcare IT News.
“We are creating an organization where several seemingly disparate industries can work together to combine their products and services through connectivity standards and provide millions of people with the tools they need to better manage their health and the health of their families,” he said in a statement.
The group will not create new networking standards, but will create guidelines for standards that device makers and others could use to make sure their products work together. Continua will collect use cases for the three areas this summer. In September, member companies will select use cases and begin work on the guidelines. The guidelines would be published one year later, Whitlinger said.
The group aims to create a product certification program with a sticker logo to indicate interoperability with other certified products. Logo certification would begin in 2008.
