Towards an open ecosystem for digital health
Since the digital health ecosystem is so fragmented, an Open design pattern is crucial. Monolithic, proprietary clinical platforms cannot meet the delay to market challenge any more than CompuServe was able to become the standard for the Internet 50 years ago. The digital health/clinical research industry would do well by adopting the IETF model of volunteer-driven, vendor-neutral standards.
This is what we are trying to accomplish at flaskdata.io — the Israeli tech startup for automated detection and response for clinical trials.
Collecting and monitoring data from researchers, patients and devices in clinical trials should be open, simple, fast and accessible for programmers.
SDK and APIs should be open. Application software vendors should compete on features, support, code quality, price/performance, usability and security. Standards will be open and vendor-neutral; designed and maintained by a volunteer organization modeled after the IETF.
The Clinical Engineering Task Force will be an open standards organization, which develops and promotes voluntary Internet standards, in particular the standards that comprise the Internet clinical protocol suite. It has no formal membership roster or membership requirements.
50 years from now, the CETF will be calling on us to modernize the patient monitoring.
