English

The European Commission has launched a call for expression of interest to appoint organisations as members of a working group on mHealth assessment guidelines. The mandate of the group is to develop guidelines for assessing the validity and reliability of the data that health apps collect and process.

ECPC has expressed a strong interest in joining this initiative since mHealth apps are becoming increasingly popular among the cancer patient community.

We have the pleasure to announce that our organisation has been selected to become a member of the group! Mrs. Kathi Apostolidis, ECPC Vice-President, will be representing ECPC within the group due to her experience and expertise in e-health and m-health integration in healthcare policy.

This is a great opportunity, since this year ECPC wants to become more involved in mHealth, with a first event on the topic planned for February 2016. The event will raise the basic questions related to the use of mHealth tools in cancer care, particularly by cancer patients. Through the debate, ECPC together with Patient View will collect the position and opinions of other key stakeholders, triggering a debate on the core issues around patients’ safety, cost-effectiveness, legal frameworks, technological barriers and patient-friendliness revolving around mHealth. During the event, ECPC will also present its comments to the Privacy Code of Conduct for mHealth apps. More information on the agenda and the exact date of the event will be communicated soon.

Over the years, ECPC has continually shown interest into mHealth, mainly through our involvement in EU funded project, eSMART. The objective of eSMART is to monitor patients via mobile phones in order to help them reduce their symptom burden experienced during chemotherapy and improve their quality of life during acute treatment and survivorship. We invite you to read more about the project and the ECPC contribution by clicking here.