The Digital Health Measurement Collaborative Community (DATAcc) is being launched https:datacc.dimesociety.org, to develop best practices and to streamline the field’s approaches to measuring health using digital technologies.
The DATAcc includes FDA, HHS, and more than 20 organizations hosted by the Digital Medicine Society. DATAcc comprises leaders from across the government, non-profits, and the private sector, and includes healthcare systems, medical technology companies, patient advocates, biopharma, and policy organizations. The goal is to modernize the way health and disease is measured by using digital approaches and technologies.
HumanFirst https://gohumanfirst.com, a company leading advancements in decentralized clinical trials and distributed virtual healthcare, was selected to work with the Digital Medicine Society as well as with the innovative health companies and organizations as part of DATAcc.
Previously known as Elektra Labs, HumanFirst acts as a command center with an API-based infrastructure, enabling decentralized trials and distributed care. The company has received funding from several health, bioscience, and tech investors as well as NSF and the Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, plus from more than 30 angel investors.
The collaborative will use interdisciplinary expertise, data, and use cases to address complex medical device challenges and how to deal with the increasing digital health literacy that is used to integrate data from consumer fitness trackers into EHRs.
DATAcc members met in May 2021, to develop the full potential of digital health measurement as a powerful new tool to drive improvements in health outcomes, health economics, and health equity. Activities will be action-oriented, ranging from the development of best practices, models, and then develop the framework to conduct pilots.
The need to address these challenges has become more important, since long standing disparities exist in access and outcomes exacerbated by COVID-19. Federal data shows that minority populations have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in terms of both incidence and mortality rates.
On a continuing basis, the collaborative community will explore priority areas to include data governance, data rights, digital inclusion, reimbursement, and then standardize elements for digital sensing products with the data produced.