The introduction last week of a mobile phone app for Patients Without Borders medical travel guides is one of several recent developments that stand to give medical travel patients, physicians and medical travel facilities access to uniform, electronic information, including patient records, thus addressing a problem that has bedeviled the medical travel industry.

This week the European Commission announced the funding of a 12-month project called Smart Personal Health that aims to promote awareness and a deeper understanding of the need for interoperability among personal health systems (PHS), devices and other eHealth systems across Europe in a move that could add significant momentum to the growth of medical tourism in the EU.

In the program, Beaverton, OR-based Continua Health Alliance, an international organization of health care and technology companies, is working with European research organizations to research interoperability within the EU and then report back to the Commission.

The report will include recommendations to the European Commission, national governments, stakeholder groups and the industry at large for promoting interoperability.

According to an announcement from Continua, "An ecosystem of personal health devices and applications, some converging from the consumer electronics world, is beginning to appear in the European market. These connected personal health solutions are being promoted by doctors and health insurers to help individuals monitor their health, fitness and overall wellness. However, their full benefit for the European Union will only be realized if these medical devices are interoperable, seamlessly transferring data regardless of manufacturer across a wide variety of networks."

The spokesperson for Continua told Travel Market Report that it is not yet clear how interoperability will affect the medical tourism market within the EU.

GE Healthcare Enhances Info Platform

Meanwhile, GE Healthcare took a step toward global interoperability with the launch of its next-generation eHealth Solutions platform - an infrastructure offering that includes expanded services for health information exchange, a clinical portal and a patient health management system.

"Healthcare professionals around the world recognize that connecting the healthcare IT ecosystem has enormous potential to improve the quality of health outcomes and to reduce costs," said Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT, in a press release.

The new eHealth Solutions platform uses the eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) that integrates clinical data from across disparate systems and manages the wide variety of clinical records, document types and terminologies pervasive in today's healthcare system.

The goal is to provide physicians and nurses with better and more complete patient information at the point-of-care to foster better care decisions with fewer medical errors, according to Wanchoo.

Visit newsroom.gehealthcare.com.

The new Patients Beyond Borders app, called HealthTraveller, is the first medical tourism app that the editor of MobiHealthNews, Brian Dolan, is aware of. Health Traveller will be available this fall for $3.99 initially on the Apple iPhone but on other smart phones eventually.

Dolan told TMR that the app, though probably the first for medical tourism, is just one of thousands of health-related apps for smart phones to come to market in the past six months.

MobiHealthNews, the daily, online trade journal for the emerging mobile health (mHealth) industry, unveiled its first paid research report, "The World of Health and Medical Apps," a quantitative analysis of health-related applications for smartphones. According to the report, the number of health related applications for smartphones has skyrocketed during the past six months from just a few hundred to 5,820 health apps, according to the report.

About 30% of all health related smart phone apps are intended for use by healthcare professionals, including physicians, nurses, medical students and others, according to the MobiHealth News report.

Dolan said that these include medical reference applications, medical calculators, electronic medical records (EMR) apps, charge capture apps, patient scheduler applications and more.

Visit www.MobiHealthNews.com/Research.