Technical Documentation for Healthcare Providers

CommonHealth connects users to their historical healthcare data, gives them complete control of how, when, and with whom to share, and focuses on consent management. The concepts related to taking control over personal data and deciding how and with whom to share those data are highly complex. The best policy and approach will be ineffective if the implementation does not work for all users of the platform. To that end, we are employing a participatory, iterative design process working with diverse groups of patients first to gain a better understanding of patients' conceptual views and beliefs about their health data and how it might be shared, then to design and assess user experiences that support people making informed personal decisions.

To foster innovation, we are inviting other healthcare apps and services in the digital health ecosystem so that we can strengthen our data sharing and privacy protection standards. Our objective is to fully support patient autonomy via personal data rights, level the developer playing field via interoperability standards, and support a vibrant and accountable developer community.  We acknowledge that to do so will require finding a middle ground in the false dichotomy of recklessly sharing all data on one hand and paternalistic data blocking on the other. 

The digital health app ecosystem will be invaluable to our design and development of data and privacy models. As you adopt our common standards, best practices, and code of conduct, we will solicit your input on how CommonHealth can further support your work. Combined with our participatory design process, your feedback will help CommonHealth to design new features and functions so that the app developer community can also benefit from our knowledge-base. 

The Commons Project is a strong believer in open source. The CommonHealth app and the CommonHealth Developer Toolkit are open source and made available according to the Apache 2.0 license. We will release all code for the core functioning of the CommonHealth app, developer tools, and health data interoperability. We may choose to hold back certain in-development code as well as code related to operations such as storage and deployment. We also may rely on certain third-party modules that are not open source. We do not require developers we work with or anyone leveraging our platform or code to be open-source, but we encourage them to do so.

CommonHealth generally follows the CARIN Alliance Code of Conduct, which in summary consists of: Asserting transparency in practice and use of data, not transacting data without explicit, informed consent, minimizing use and disclosure of data, providing individual access to data, using security best practices, maintaining data provenance, being accountable for our actions, taking the opportunity to educate users, and being an advocate for greater availability of standards-compliant health data. 

This section is for Enterprise Health Data Partners and covers the Data Source and EHR connectivity needed to allow your users to access your data through CommonHealth. Currently, any enterprise wanting to connect to CommonHealth must have an Enterprise Implementation Lead from The Commons Project. 

For enterprise integration, CommonHealth will need specific information from the enterprise partner. The following information will enable your organization to be presented within the CommonHealth app after launch. If you are an enterprise partner trying to implement CommonHealth, please share the following information with our technical team: 

    1. Name of your organization

    2. Description

    3. Your desired Logo in URL format and/or as an attachment with a clear background

    4. OAuth Client Information

      1. Production Base URI for your SMART on FHIR server (and Sandbox Base URI, if applicable)

      2. OAuth Client ID (if applicable)

    5. Site-specific implementation details

      1. e.g., Procedures, Goals not supported

    6. Privacy policy URI

    7. Consent management policy and relevant information

Once CommonHealth is connected successfully and has access to your organization’s sandbox or sample data, we will run a series of internal tests.

CommonHealth will have a pre-production environment that you can use for testing against your organization’s production instance (and sandbox, if applicable). Your team will be able to sign in to your production EHR using their production account credentials to download data into CommonHealth.

 Each member of your team who wishes to use the pre-production application will need to provide the email address tied to their Android device. During this phase, your organization’s listing will not show up in the searchable directory in the publicly available version of CommonHealth. Your team will be provided with an invitation code for this specific reason, applicable only to the pre-production application.

Your organization will be searchable in the production app as a Data Source once testing procedures are successful and agreed upon between all parties. 

CommonHealth is designed to work on most Android devices using version 6 and newer. 

CommonHealth may not work on rooted devices.

The user’s phone must have enough internal storage to download the app. Additional storage may be needed to cache our partner images to be used within the app. Additional storage may be needed to securely download records. 

The CommonHealth app must be connected to the internet through the phone’s data connection or through a wireless/wifi connection.

The CommonHealth Enterprise Implementation team will work closely with your organization to determine an appropriate launch date for the app. The definition of a launch date is when a user can find and connect to your organization through the CommonHealth app.

This date will be dependent on your organization providing the minimum required information.  A launch is not dependent on optional project tasks such as training and user distribution work.

We will continue to develop CommonHealth with feedback from our developer community. However, we request that you share your crucial feedback with us within thirty (30) days after starting your testing.

Technical Support: developers@commonhealth.org

Business Support: ops@thecommonsproject.org