A letter from Co-Founder JP Pollak

I’ve spent the last 20 years working in mobile and digital health and to be honest much of what we’ve promised over the years hasn’t come to pass. The reality is that most of the innovative digital health applications researchers have imagined have been starved for data. Data about behavior, data about context, and data about a person’s clinical history and status. We’ve gotten really good at the first two over the last decade or so, but only now, thanks to shifting market and regulatory pressures, are we beginning to tap into the third.

With colleagues at Cornell Tech, UCSF, and Sage Bionetworks, The Commons Project started CommonHealth out of a belief that the ecosystem needed parity- an open source, Android complement to Apple Health. This parity is important for people, it’s important for providers looking to encourage patients to take control over their health, it’s important for developers and researchers building digital health apps and services, and it’s important for equity.

CommonHealth helps people download their own health records directly to their device, store them securely only for themselves, or share those data, with consent, with their trusted apps and services running on their phone. At TCP, we’ve taken our time getting this model right. With collaborators at UCSF, we’ve done extensive user research and testing to ensure that people get value from CommonHealth, and that the equitable access we’re pushing for is in fact equitable. We’ve worked closely with providers including early partners like Mass General Brigham and LabCorp to make sure that every detail in the data is right, and we extensively QA each new provider we bring on board. 

As we work on future functionality like support for pediatric records, we work with domain experts at Stanford Children’s Health, and we do participatory design work to address the challenges of sharing data with third parties - how do we gather informed consent from people, how do we protect their data, and how do we decide which apps and services get to connect and keep them accountable. We’ve worked with key stakeholder groups including patients and patient advocates, providers, privacy and security experts, ethicists, app developers, regulators, and industry coalitions like the CARIN Alliance. And by operating CommonHealth under The Commons Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, our interests are fully aligned with those of CommonHealth users.

CommonHealth is already a great experience for owners of Android phones, connected to hundreds of health organizations and thousands of care facilities. CommonHealth is a developer-friendly platform that enables digital health innovators and app makers to even use a Cordova plug-in and write one set of code for both iOS and Android. We’re really excited to get under way with the developer community. 

We’re working with health plans on several initiatives, of course including getting people access to claims and related information. We’re working with Open mHealth on standards-driven ingestion of wearable and other mobile health data and are looking forward to talking about this very soon. 

Finally, we’re doing what we can to help people through the pandemic. The sharing of COVID-19 test results and vaccination records is a natural role for CommonHealth. We are working to give people a way to present signed health data to verifiers such as employers or airlines and have those data be trusted while enabling privacy. We’ve implemented the SMART Health Cards framework in CommonHealth, which leverages the W3C Verifiable Credential Standards, and is supported by major technology companies, hundreds of care providers, and a growing number of states. 

We look forward to growing CommonHealth with you.