Reviving The Health Revolution

Thought this might be an interesting post from my personal blog.

Even before I do my HIMSS post I felt compelled to talk about the shiny things from Mix 2010.

• Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Studio – I love the free tools provided to develop for Windows Phone. Love the fact that Silverlight and XNA studio are very thoughtfully and seamlessly working with-in Visual Studio Express. The developer studio is lean and performant, its great to see the tool tips for Pixel widths right in the design surface. I was able to write a simple Health app in about 10 mins, the Phones are not out yet but the

• Open Data Protocol : Very interesting competition to GData . OData – http://www.odata.org/ is a combination of AtomPub with data-typing and querying conventions. OData is supported out of the box by Windows Azure services, and Netflix launch an API powered by OData – http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/. It will be great to learn more about batching and syncing aspects of this protocol (Interestingly Microsoft Sync Platform also launched an asymmetric syncing capability).
• Data Relay : MySpace which is the largest .NET site open sourced their middle-tier GU – http://datarelay.codeplex.com/. DataRelay has a framework for message passing, transaction management on top of a performant caching system. Apparently it uses The CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) from Microsoft Robotic Studio .
• A very interesting presentation of building your own MVVM framework – I love the use of Continuations and a programming model where the framework takes care of concurrency and events! The presenter is author of Caliburn – http://www.codeplex.com/caliburn.
• Font-ing it out – For a font newbie like me, all i know about Fonts I learnt from Kevin Larsons presentation : http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/DS07 

Twitter hashtag for mix is #mix10 and session recordings are available at http://live.visitmix.com

Cover It Live event for HIMSS Conference:

Connectivity of Care Document (CCD) is a collaborative standard driven by HL7 & ASTM for exchanging summary format clinical information.

For ease of understanding one can think of CCD standard comprising of several elements in an hierarchical fashion:

1. HL7 V3 Data Types and Reference Information Model (RIM) : At the base of CCD standard are the HL7 Data types and Reference Information Model.  HL7 V3 data types define the structural format of the data carried. The HL7 RIM expresses the information content of work done by HL7 working committee to define data types, relationships between them, and a state transition model for some entities.
2. Clinical Document Architecture (CDA): The HL7 CDA defines the specific structure and semantics for any clinical document for purposes of exchange. CDA document can be encoded in XML. A CDA document if encoded in XML must comply to the schema. NIST has a good CDA validation tool.
3. CCD Implementation Guide: The CCD implementation guide describes the constraints on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture R2 specification in accordance with requirements set forward by ASTM (the governing body behind CCR).

Fig 1. Components of CCD Standard

Related articles in this series :

1. Understanding Vocabularies. Wait! What did you say?
2. Understanding Vocabularies #2 – HealthVault Recommendations
3. Understanding SNOMED CT
4. Understanding CCR

Happy new year!! I’m summarizing the Best of 2009 on Reviving the Health Revolution blog -

Understanding Health IT Standards
In April I started a series which aims at helping a programmer understand Health IT standards. I aim to develop this series further in 2010 and I’m also working on a compilation of essays on Health IT, you are encouraged to provide feedback here.

The series so far talks about Vocabularies, HealthVault Data Types in context of various Health IT Standards, SNOMED-CT, CCR.

WalkMe
I started the year with posting about WalkMe, and followed in July with a detailed post about data syncing architecture of this application. This simple walking application is now tracking over 2 million steps! If you want to add a live pedometer signature to your outlook e-mail follow this post. Future features and development of this application is primarily driven by user feedback.

HealthVault Applications using ASP.NET MVC and on Windows Azure
In July I did a post showing how one use ASP.NET MVC framework for developing HealthVault applications. The HealthVault .NET SDK is primarily geared towards ASP.NET Webforms.

In October I wrote about how one can deploy HealthVault applications on Windows Azure! This is has been a very popular article, check out some live samples running on Windows Azure here.

Flu Management
In April I post about Ushahidi’s Crisis management application for Swine Flu. In October I blogged in detailed about Microsoft’s Flu Management center and my little Flu widget.

HealthVault XML APIs
The HealthVault .NET SDK serves majority of HealthVault partners but last year we saw increase in adoption of our XML APIs consuming it through the Java SDK, Python SDK , Ruby Wrapper or the raw XML layers. The series on working with XML layer is a good starting point.

Connected Health Conference
For those of you who missed this conference in June, you can catch up here.

Programming Techniques & Data Analysis
Functional Programming, Memoization .. ring a bell? Well I plan on dwelling more on programming techniques and data analysis in 2010.

Feel free to let me know you top post for 2009, in comments.