A view from inside the HealthVault

I overviewed the Health 2.0 2009 conference largely through twitter. Here are my key takeaways:

• HealthCare needs to become more consumer: All innovation will be driven through this domain, PatientsLikeMe & CureTogether are prime examples.
• Keas launched as a platform for Care plans – I took it for a spin love the way you can create action items! Not as intuitive as Mint but not really a good analogy either.
• Health 2.0 Accelerator – A lot of media towards this effort of trying a create a platform (yet again) to add for value for the end consumer using the better together model. Here is a Demo Video.
• Public Health Media: Microsoft’s H1N1 Center, Google Flu Trends
• Mobile: WebMD iPhone App
• Physician’s Office: NPDigest.com – open source groupware for a clinic.

Please add your thought about the conference through the comments.

Jared Diamond makes a case that our recent history has been shaped by Guns, Germs and Steel. In this century we have seen in various ways how Guns, Germs and Steel wield their power. Currently, we are dealing with one such power fit of *Germs*. They say, flu is in the air, beware!

Earlier this year I had made a post about tracking Swine Flu using Ushahidi’s software. Various folks online have tried to help raise awareness of the pertinent epidemic, most noticeably CDC has launched a comprehensive website flu.gov to inform us better. Microsoft has launched the H1N1 Response Center and Google is helping through Flu trends.

Most common flu is the seasonal flu, which every year takes a toll of about 36,000 lives from late fall (Nov) to early Spring (March) and effects about 5-20 percent of population. This season we have a risk for a getting hit by swine flu (H1N1) which can cause more deaths, and there is an even deadlier version – the avian flu (H5N1).

So what should you do?

• Wash your hands and avoid close contact with sick people.
• Consider taking the Flu shot from a facility near you
• If you feel Flu, take a Flu assessment powered by HealthVault .
• Spread Flu Awareness – may be use the widget below:

Here is the code to copy this widget to your blog / website:

<iframe height="200" src="http://www.reemedix.com/misc/fluwidget.html"
    frameborder="0" width="300" scrolling="no">
</iframe>

Earlier this year Myself and my colleague, Chris Tremonte, did a bike ride from Seattle to San Francisco. Thought I would link my ride report from here as well. Hopefully we helped in someway to increase the awareness for HealthDataRights.

Recently the ASP.NET MVC framework came out of beta and has garnered a lot of developer interest. This framework tries to provide interesting things like – total control over HTML, human readable URLs, AJAX, and facilitates test driven development. Successful web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails (ruby), Django (python) and Spring (Java) – also enable these characteristics. So cleary, there is some traction and tread for web frameworks to facilitate the Model, View, Controller paradigm.

There are quite a few challenges with regards to HealthVault SDK to work in this realm. The standard HealthServicePage no longer works in a controller paradigm. Eventually the SDK will need to provide a HealthServiceController, but until then I’ll try and explain how we can use the current SDK to work in an ASP.NET MVC world.

As I have explained earlier in my ruby series HealthVault authenticates an application in three contexts – anonymous, the application itself and the application in presence of user information. In this series I will try to take the same approach and explain how we can do the same with ASP.NET MVC.

It’s relative easy to talk to HealthVault via the anonymous GetServiceDefination method. Here is the heart of the code which enables this:

   1: public ActionResult Index()

   2: {

   3:     ViewData["Message"] = "Welcome to HealthVault ASP.NET MVC!";

   4:     

   5:     // Do an anonymous connection with HealthVault using the Hello World application id

   6:     ApplicationConnection appConnection = new ApplicationConnection(

   7:         new Guid("05a059c9-c309-46af-9b86-b06d42510550"),

   8:         "https://platform.healthvault-ppe.com/platform/");

   9:     // Get the service defination from HealthVault platform

  10:     ServiceInfo sInfo = appConnection.GetServiceDefinition();

  11:     // Pass the data for viewing

  12:     ViewData["ServiceInfo"] = sInfo.HealthServiceUrl.ToString();

  13:     return View();

  14: }

Next time: How to authenticate your application with HealthVault through ASP.NET MVC

In my last article in the vocabulary category, I described the need for semantically enabled data and how different categories of health data have different standard vocabulary / ontology associated with them. In the following table I attempt to summarize the recommended vocabularies for different HealthVault types.

Disclaimer: Please note this is not a definitive or complete list, and I will update the table as I discover inconsistencies. The definitive source are the XSDs associated with HealthVault data types.

As  you can notice above we recommend ICD-9, RxNorm, LOINC, NDC. x12-de-1130, x12-de-335. We do prefer SNOMED-CT as well, however the application using it need to have license for it.

Having written the above I would like to match that with what Dr. Halamka recommends in his post. Note that I mention content column for completeness, however its not useful for comparison.

Next Time: I’ll try to update the above tables with more details and try to come with recommendations of which clinical type (in the Data column above) would potentially match with which HealthVault type.

As usual leave your suggestions in the comments.