Ten Principles for Fostering Development of an “iPhone-like” Platform for Healthcare Information Technology

Leading health care information technology researchers, physicians, and renowned experts in innovation released a set of core principles to guide the creation of a new health information infrastructure to better support the nation’s complex and evolving health system.

The principles follow up on a Perspective piece published in the New England Journal of Medicine in March, authored by Isaac S. Kohane, MD, PhD, and Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, of the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston. The article argued for the development of a platform model—similar in nature to the approach of the Apple iPhone—that would support an ecosystem of “substitutable” health care applications.

Inspired by the significant response to their concept of creating a platform for health IT, Kohane and Mandl convened a working group at the Harvard Medical School Center for Biomedical Informatics to create a clear set of “next steps” for fostering the development of such a platform:

Ten Principles for Fostering Development of an “iPhone-like” Platform for Healthcare Information Technology [pdf]