NODE Health, a consortium of the nation’s leading academic medical centers convenes for the Connected Health Conference at the Gaylord National Hotel in MD on Tuesday, December 13, 2016.

Washington, DC -- (ReleaseWire) -- 12/12/2016 --Tuesday, December 13th, The Network of Digital Evidence in Health (NODE Health), a consortium founded to bring digital health out of its snake-oil infancy and into the forefront of evidence based medicine, is being featured at the 2016 Connected Health Conference. NODE Health will pioneer a system for knowledge sharing between academic medical centers to fast track technologies that improve patient outcomes.

With over 245,000 mobile health apps on the marketplace, it is difficult to determine which ones actually improve health. American Medical Association (AMA) CEO James L Madara, M.D. famously described "digital so-called advancements that don't have an appropriate evidence base" as the "snake oil of the early 21st century" in an address to the House of Delegates at the AMA Annual Meeting on June 11, 2016. To replace snake oil claims with proven scientific evidence, NODE Health is bringing together academic medical institutions, accelerators, startups, and corporate partners to share information about the pilot studies that prove the impact of digital medicine on health outcomes.

"Every healthcare innovation center in the world is trying to run single-site pilot studies to solve the evidence problem," says Ashish Atreja, MD, MPH, Chief Technology Innovation and Engagement Officer and Director of the Sinai AppLab, Mount Sinai. "The problem is that, without a standardized method across health systems to build and share the evidence from pilot studies, no one knows what anyone else is doing. The result is rampant, wasteful duplication at the same time that promising new technologies face 'death by pilot' because it is so difficult to do the studies that would prove their effectiveness. NODE Health will create an evidence-based ecosystem through which all the stakeholders in digital medicine can support one another in multi-site trials determining which innovations deliver real value to patients."

NODE Health will begin by building a national digital medicine registry that will share information about pilot studies of digital medicine, avoiding duplication of efforts and creating transparency in the same way the ClinicalTrials.gov registry does for studies of new drugs and treatments. The Connected Health Conference meeting will bring together NODE Health consortium leaders at Mount Sinai, Stanford, Scripps, Case, Mass General, American College of Cardiology, Montefiore, Northwell, Cornell, LifeBridge, George Washington, SB Health System and NJIT. Panelists will present plans to standardize existing governance and regulatory policies to fast track pilot adoption and evaluation; adopt new research designs and clinical trial endpoints that are relevant to value-based healthcare; and launch strategic initiatives to support multi-site digital medicine pilots. The meeting is organized by the Personal Connected Health Alliance, a strategic division of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

For more information about NODE Health, join the "Building Digital Evidence Together" event at the Gaylord National in the Washington, D.C. area on December 13, 2016 http://tinyurl.com/LetsBuildEvidence, or visit NODE Health at http://www.nodehealth.org.