HIMSS 2011 was my first big healthcare industry conference. The trade show is one of a kind and the largest gathering of folks interested in HealthCare IT in United States. In 2012, I attended the conference virtually and this year I’m back on the show floor. This is a coming out event for the product I have been working on at Optum – Optum Direct! Optum Direct is a secure messaging platform built on the ONC sponsored Direct Standard. If you want to know more, stop by our booth #7041 on the show floor I would love to show it in action. Additionally, our early adopter customer Santa Cruz HIE & Physicians Medical Group is showcasing this product with connectivity to Microsoft HealthVault and others in the interoperability showcase.

Having said above, among a plethora of sessions and events I’m looking forward to following events at the conference -

• Interoperability Showcase : A real-life standards play in action!
• Brian Ahier’s – Developing Trust in the Health Internet as a Platform
• ONC’s HIE Seminar
• Exhibit Show floor buzzed with words like – ICD-10, Meaningful Use, ACO, etc.

Editor of my book – Programmable Self with HealthVault, Andy Oram will be covering the conference along with others for O’Reilly. Brian Ahier has a good preview of the coverage.

If you are at the conference or are virtual (@ #HIMSS13) please drop me a note as I would love to connect!

Dear Reader –

Apologies I have been a bit on blogging hiatus! Among other things, I recently released my book on HealthVault, Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault.

Quantified Self blog covered the book and the story behind it in its toolmaker talk series. Over next few weeks I’m hoping to post about a number of topics including Restful Health Exchange, NwHIN Governance, FHIR, HealthVault mobile applications and I’ll also be updating the compendium website for the book – www.enablingprogrammableself.com.

Please let me know in comments if you have suggestions for me to write about.

P.S. – I also moved on from Microsoft and I’m active in healthcare and technology community travelling frequently between Seattle, Bay Area and sometimes Minnesota.

In 2009, WiseVoter made it to headlines in Indian news media. With a few volunteers we are trying to bring this non-profit citizen empowering site to US for the improving the health of 2012 elections! If you have features suggestions/ ideas please share them below.

Let me show you some awesomeness, and then I’ll explain what’s going on! Continue reading →

In the last post, we discussed how one can display the data retrieved from HealthVault Emotional State data-type.

I showed an interesting LINQ query which sort the HealthVault items returned from a getthings. Well actually turns out that we can do this more efficiently by using the max attribute on group filter in the getthings. The items returned by HealthVault are sorted by eff-date and if we get the first one it should be the latest item!

        public static void GetThings(string typeId, int maxItems,
            EventHandler<HealthVaultResponseEventArgs> responseCallback)
        {
            string thingXml = @"
            <info>
                <group max='{0}'>
                    <filter>
                        <type-id>{1}</type-id>
                        <thing-state>Active</thing-state>
                    </filter>
                    <format>
                        <section>core</section>

Before we get to the topic of this post and discuss how we can put new items in to HealthVault, here a screen shot of how the application looks like once we have enabled the put and prettied up the last reading a little bit –

Fig 1. MoodTracker with put enabled!

We can see that for each of the states i.e mood, stress and wellbeing we have a nice slider which lets the user capture their state and we can want this information uploaded with current time stamp once the user hits Save!

        // Save the reading to HealthVault
        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            EmotionalStateModel model = new EmotionalStateModel();
            model.Mood = (Mood)c_MoodSlider.Value;
            model.Stress = (Stress)c_StressSlider.Value;
            model.Wellbeing = (Wellbeing)c_WellbeingSlider.Value;
            model.When = DateTime.Now;
            HealthVaultMethods.PutThings(model, PutThingsCompleted);
            SetProgressBarVisibility(true);
        }

Lets get a bit deeper in how the PutThings call works. It fetches the relevant information from the base object and submits that to HealthVault. The design in this case might be a little wary since the put parameters are coming from the emotional state object as well.

        /// <summary>
        /// PutThings Method
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="item">The health item to upload</param>
        /// <param name="responseCallback">Function to resolve callback</param>
        public static void PutThings(HealthRecordItemModel item,
            EventHandler<HealthVaultResponseEventArgs> responseCallback)
        {
            XElement info = XElement.Parse(item.GetXml());
            HealthVaultRequest request = new HealthVaultRequest("PutThings", "2", info, responseCallback);
            App.HealthVaultService.BeginSendRequest(request);
        }

Voila!! We have an application which can read and update information to HealthVault!

Next Time: We will focus on adding the History or Charting aspects of this application!