How It Began

During their service together on a National Academies committee in 2008, Deborah Estrin and Ida Sim realized that mobile health (mHealth) was an up-and-coming technology, and if we could successfully apply lessons learned from other information technologies, the impact on health could be dramatic. In 2010, they co-authored a position paper in Science Magazine calling for an open mHealth architecture. In April 2011, Deborah and Ida convened a group of experts from the software and health worlds to strategize about how to actualize such an architecture.

Open mHealth aims to bridge the divide between health and technology to enable meaningful collaboration. Our unique role is to work collaboratively with all actors in the mHealth ecosystem to grow shared software and techniques. Open mHealth is part of the solution – whether you’re proprietary or open source, public or private, we can be complementary to, and integrative of, your work.

What’s Next?

Open mHealth is currently working on projects around post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and pain management, to drive the initial build-out of the open software architecture. We’re also working on a series of events and other ways for people like you to engage with and help jumpstart community sharing and learning in mHealth. Check out the Get Involved page to see how you can contribute.