At this year’s Apps for Health Conference, hosted by Mohawk College’s mHealth and eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC), speakers from healthcare and technology will address this dynamic relationship, exploring the theme of “Connecting Consumers and Care Providers”.

William Charnetski, Ontario’s new Chief Health Innovation Strategist, and Dr. Paul Biondich, Director, Global Health Informatics Program, Regenstrief Institute, are among the digital health thought leaders that will be delivering keynotes at the April 28^th event. Concurrent sessions will also highlight new initiatives and best practices in virtual care, big data, patient engagement and Global mHealth.

Now in its sixth year, Apps for Health brings together over 300 healthcare and IT professionals, researchers, educators, students and policy makers to learn from experts in the field and to discuss the current trends in healthcare technology.

Registration for Apps for Health is now open at www.apps4health.ca. An early bird registration rate of $85 will be available until March 15, 2016. Regular and on-site registration will be $100. Students with a valid ID can register for the event at a special rate of only $25. The event will be held on April 28, 2016 at Mohawk College, 135 Fennell Avenue West, Hamilton, Ontario.

“Health workers prosecuted for snooping”

“Government vows to change health privacy law”

“Data breach exposes information”

A quick scan of the headlines in Canada’s major newspapers reveals some alarming news: our health records aren’t always as private as we would like them to be.

In October 2014, two staff nurses leaked information about former Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s cancer treatments. As of June 2015, charges have been laid against staff from the Rouge Valley Centenary hospital in east Toronto who allegedly leaked information about new mothers to a company that sells RESPs.

These are just two examples of the many privacy related breaches that have occurred recently in Ontario. In 2014, 400 health care privacy violations were reported to Ontario’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. Because reporting privacy breaches is not required in Ontario, reports suggest that this estimate may not actually reflect the true number of privacy breaches, which can include anything from malicious hacker attacks against a large database to careless record keeping in a small doctor’s office.

The proposed updates to the Personal Health Information Protection Act, announced by the Ontario government in June 2015, promises to establish better privacy and security requirements in the health sector and will require thatall privacy breaches be reported.

Protecting privacy is important. In the case of your digital medical records, it is also a complex process that requires a sophisticated system to protect it from unauthorized use.

At Mohawk College, Alex Unruh and David Kirkley are working to protect you from privacy breaches before the data is even inputted into the system.

They’ve just spent the first few months of their co-op work term in Mohawk’s mHealth & eHealth Development and Innovation Centre (MEDIC) examining Canada and Ontario’s privacy laws. They are working on a privacy assessment tool that is more than just a Band-Aid for breaches. It’s a comprehensive privacy checklist that can be used to make sure that any new eHealth or mHealth product can easily check for compliance and ensure that collected data is safe and secure.

Paul Brown, Research Project Manager (Software) of iDeaWORKS and supervisor of the co-op students, believes that the privacy assessment tool is a smart solution that will answer a common question.

“Many of the clients that came to us had no idea about how to handle privacy and security,” says Brown. “Or they came to us and said: ‘We want to be HIPAA or PHIPAA compliant, where do we start?”

“We want our clients to understand the privacy process so we created our own tool,” Brown explains.

“No one has ever created an automated tool to make privacy and security this accessible and understandable.”

And the tool isn’t just comprehensive -it is fast. MEDIC’s efforts have made it possible for a digital health company to understand their privacy requirements in just a few days.

While reading political legislation may sound like something more suited to a political science student instead of a developer, Unruh and Kirkley appreciated having the opportunity to tackle privacyhead-on.

“When you are working in eHealth, privacy is huge,” says Unruh. “You need to be compliant with all the legislation. A lot of the time you need to have an auditor come in before you even release your application to make sure it is airtight and in line with the legislation.”

Kirkley praises the tool for its ability to make the privacy audit process more straightforward.

“For custodians and other general users within the different companies, just reading the legislation would be very difficult for them to understand unless they had a background in law or had a lot of time,” says Kirkley. “By posing questions in plain English, it is a lot easier for them to understand.”

Brown sees additional value in offering the tool on an a-la-carte basis - one that allows MEDICclients, depending on which stage of the process they are currently at, to understand whatis needed as they move through their development.

“The timeline depends on where the company is at in their process. Reading through all ofthe information can be onerous. We want to give them the opportunity to say: ‘I’m interested in this component, so I can work on this now.’ “

This article was originally published in the 2015 volume of Quanta, Mohawk College’s annual celebration of research and innovation.

Author Andrea Johnson is Promotions and Industry Liaison Officer for iDeaWORKS and the editor of Quanta.

Mohawk's 3rd annual Apps for Health Conference is underway at the College's Fennell Campus today. The conference brings health care and industry professionals together with students and educators to explore the frontiers of health, technology and education.
This year’s conference welcomes more than 350 participants and focuses on the latest advances in eHealth, mHealth and mLearning.

The theme for the smartphone healthcare application challenge was "Connected Care for Consumers and Clinicians".

Taking first prize of $3500 were Hamilton brothers Leo and Jerad Godreault for their submission entitled "SmartMed". SmartMed is an end to end prescription adherence tool, allowing for the electronic capture of a prescription regime and translates it into a medication schedule on a smartphone. The app then issues reminders and tracks the progress of the patient through the course of treatment. The tool also offers cloud-based reporting and analytics on an individual and group basis. The tool allows others concerned about the course of care to be included (clinicians and even family members if allowed by the patient) to remotely monitor progress and be alerted when thresholds of adherence are exceeded.

Taking the third prize of $1500 was Rahulbai Patel with his App entitled "MyPCS" -- a consumer-oriented "Product Safety Checker" that individuals can use at the point of purchase to make decisions about over the counter medications and remedies. The App uses a smartphone camera to scan the product barcode and issues a query to the patient's online personal health record as well as to online pharmaceutical databases provided by the Canadian Pharmacists Association. The App looks for potential side-effects that may affect the patient and using an evidence-based ruleset makes a recommendation to the patient about the product.

Six judges evaluated the entries, and ranged from Physicians to executives from organizations such as Microsoft and Canada Health Infoway. The prizes were presented by COACH Organization CEO Don Newsham at the concluding keynote session on May 30 2012.

The students were supported by the Mohawk College Applied Research Centre for eHealth in Hamilton, Ontario. The NSERC-sponsored Centre has been conducting applied research in the areas of eHealth and mHealth since 2007.

For more information go to: www.appsforhealth.ca