Continua Alliance’s main goal is to achieve certified interoperability. For an industry organization, it faces a lot obstruction from official standardization bodies. On top of that, as Gianluca mentioned here, the FDA poses some problems and delays the entire market of healthcare. Continua is playing on an international market and is therefore affected by measures taken in the US. What is happening on the European continent? A serious contender boosted by the European bodies has appeared promoting the same goals as the international industry based organization, Continua Alliance.
CALLIOPE is coordinating an open, stakeholder-driven process to identify key challenges and issues related to interoperability, and define priorities for a European eHealth Roadmap. The Roadmap has been identified as a major policy instrument to support the European eHealth Governance Process.
I can definitely see the cooperation of the two bodies, with members from one attending events of the other and giving speeches and sharing information. But I cannot help wondering, why is there a need to have to bodies trying to achieve the same purposes. The model and the approach of both organizations seem to be rather similar in many aspects.
Standardization is one of the priorities of both based on use-case analysis. However, as part of the latest goals of the European Digital Agenda, Calliope tends to focus solely on the standardization process and how to implement this process within the member states, but less on the security of data from measuring device to the medical health records. The CALLIOPE recommendations support the need for a wider dialogue on how standards bring value to health care, with a framework for contribution from participants. It is important that standards are developed in response to well defined user needs, and users (especially professional organizations) need to play a stronger role in providing the use cases and enumerating the potential benefits of the standards they need. These organizations also need to play an active role in the education and promotion of the resulting system features that incorporate those standards. Beyond the application of standards in a public policy context, the benefits of standards should be promoted to the wider community and through the research arena, education system, the place of standards in the economy, and their role in meeting the needs of public authorities and society.
The advantage of this European body is that it has the support of the European Community and therefore it already has what it is desired to be an open and transparent, structured method of implementation at member state level. The guidelines imposed by the European Standards Organizations are to be followed to the letter by the local representatives, unlike the guidelines of Continua which are followed on a voluntary basis.
The standardization process of Calliope is open and accessible, very similar to that of the alliance. The CALLIOPE recommendations include pooling knowledge and talent from experts and promoting consortia in order to progress in certain fields. The interaction of stakeholders (potential end-users, large and small- to medium-sized enterprises) and the standardization organizations should be simple enough to encourage cooperation between the two. An important issue to be addressed is the assessment of intellectual property rights and license, as mentioned here. Dealing with a number of standards, which include various costs in terms of IPR, falls short of achieving interoperability by producers. However, Calliope argues that the prime beneficiary of the standardization program is the market, and their efforts strive to accomplish that with the aid of the European Commission directions.
Given the similar approach and similar goals of Continua Alliance and Calliope, the cooperation between them should be obvious. However, I cannot help thinking that the purpose of this European Standards Organization in the healthcare environment is purely to verify the actions and decisions taken at a worldwide level by companies on the market through Continua.
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