A framework for developing digital health applications with efficiency and reuse principles: DHLink case study

Abstract

Summary A common issue among digital health applications is that they are based on project‐specific solutions and are developed from scratch, which results in redundant development and lack of data and technology reuse. This can be seen in, for example, building study specific websites and mobile frontends, deploying customized infrastructures, and collecting data that may have been collected in other studies and projects. However, existing data and technology are not easily shareable between projects due to large investment required to address data exchanging mechanism, data and technology sovereignty, data security and resource discovery, while the benefit for the resource owners is uncertain. In this article, we present a supporting framework, named DHLink, to address this issue on two fronts. First, the DHLink framework securely connects multiple digital health applications, facilitates real‐time data sharing, and supports rapid application development by reusing data and technology. Second, to aid in rapid development of new digital health applications, a set of highly generic and reusable microservices has been developed as the initial resources available in the DHLink ecosystem. Two proof‐of‐concept use cases outlined show the effectiveness of DHLink for both data sharing between existing applications, and rapid development of a new application.