The European mHealth Hub has moved through various phases of development. It now has a new set of aims and a revised 2023 agenda of activities.
In a first phase, from 2016 onward, WHO and ITU developed a set of mHealth-related activities under the label, “Be he@lthy, Be mobile”, with EU funding. In a second phase, they were joined by Fundación Pública Andaluza Progreso y Salud (FPS) and a large stakeholder community.
The hub has invested large amounts of effort to collect, assess and consolidate existing information in priority areas. This investment resulted in many valuable hub resources but, most importantly, in a significant learning about and understanding of the landscape. Increasingly, the aim was to open up the European mHealth Hub project to a much wider scope and community.
As of February 2023, the hub is now ready for its next challenge – its transformation from a project to a service. The WHO and ITU remain the hub owners, and I~HD, EHTEL and Oulu Health have taken over the hub’s transformation and operation. Together with the WHO and the ITU, the three organisations make up the Strategy Board of the mHealth Hub.
As part of this transformation process, the hub is taking stock of the valuable resources and community of followers developed during the project phase. The hub is reaching out to a larger mHealth and digital health community as well as potential partners.
Aims
The aim is to engage people in:
- Developing a common understanding of a few selected topics of high interest for the community, i.e.,
- Reimbursement and incentivisation schemes;
- Clinical value and socio-economic assessment methods;
- Integration into health systems, including in clinical pathways and electronic health record (EHR) systems.
- Sharing the results of the hub’s work with the community at large.
- Building partnerships towards the transformation of the hub into an information access point. The focus will be on supporting public and private health organisations (on the demand side) to adopt mHealth-related policies, strategies and solutions (on the supply side) that have proven their value and maturity.
Together, in the hub’s first year of work after its re-launch, hub members will explore ways to expand and grow the hub services, members, and partners in a sustainable way.
Currently, the hub is concentrating its efforts on the following tasks:
- Adapting its organisation to meet the renewed hub ambition;
- Reconnecting with the original mHealth Hub followers;
- Resuming the series of mHealth Hub Talks through the planning of a first 2023 talks.
In this respect, the hub already announced the first two Talks:
- You have an mHealth solution, how did you succeed? on 12 April 2023
- Who needs secondary use of health app data? in May 2023
To sum-up, in 2023, the mHealthHub will shift concretely from project to service delivery.
The European mHealth Hub is operated by:
