Enabling prescription-based health apps

Abstract

We describe an innovative framework for prescription of personalised health apps by integrating Personal Health Records (PHR) with disease-specific mobile applications for managing medical conditions and the communication with clinical professionals. The prescribed apps record multiple variables including medical history enriched with innovative features such as integration with medical monitoring devices and wellbeing trackers to provide patients and clinicians with a personalised support on disease management. Our framework is based on an existing PHR ecosystem called TreC, uniquely positioned between healthcare provider and the patients, which is being used by over 70.000 patients in Trentino region in Northern Italy. We also describe three important aspects of health app prescription and how medical information is automatically encoded through the TreC framework and is prescribed as a personalised app, ready to be installed in the patients' smartphone.