Health IT built for foreign markets generally doesn't translate well to the U.S.

A widely heard criticism of many American electronic health records (EHR) systems in the U.S. is that they're designed not primarily to enable clinicians to provide the best patient care, but to help providers produce the documentation they need to get paid. That's just the nature of our inefficient, fee-for-service system.

Similarly, most of the Western world switched to ICD-10 coding years ago, but the U.S. won't be there until at least October 2013—and CMS has indicated that it might push back that deadline. One reason: the American version of ICD-10 is more complex because it includes billing as well as diagnostic codes.

Plus, we have things such as HIPAA privacy and security standards and EHR certification for the "meaningful use" incentive program. Other countries don't.

But mobile health IT is different. Like pharmaceutical, medical equipment and devices technology industries, m-health and telemedicine appear to be pretty much the same worldwide (even if regulations do differ from country to country).

I'm in Denmark this week for Europe's eHealth Week and, at least in part, the World of Health IT conference put on by the U.S.-based Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Copenhagen. But Monday I was part of a side trip to the southern city of Odense, where a regional development center is promoting innovation in "welfare tech," technology for health and social services. (In this sense, "welfare" doesn't have the same negative connotation it can carry in the states.)

The organizers set up a "living lab" in a healthcare innovation center, where, among other things, visitors could view a mock-up of a senior apartment filled with personal monitoring and safety technologies to allow for independent living, including touch-screen communication stations. The screen prompts may have been in Danish, but the concept looked awfully familiar.

Similarly, I got a demo of new smartphone and tablet apps (Android first, believe it or not) from U.K.-based consulting and software firm Logica that collect data from wireless home health devices such as pulse oximeters and spirometers to help manage chronic diseases. You know, stuff MobiHealthNews writes about all the time, technology that I could bring home and use right now, regardless of whether it has FDA 510(k) clearance or not.

Another featured company, this one a home-grown company from Odense called e-Mergency, has an interesting idea: give smartphone-based prompts for people with dementia to remind them when it's time to take their meds, get dressed, eat or perform any one of a number of tasks that such patients can't remember. The app, set to be released in the Danish market within a couple of weeks, includes pictures and instructions to help people hold onto to some of their independence even as they lose cognitive function.

The company admitted to me that the technology hasn't really been tested, so I don't know at what point people with dementia will lose the ability to operate a smartphone, but if the concept works, there's a global market for this product. When was the last time someone said that about an EHR or hospital management system?