What is HealthVault?
HealthVault is the single repository of your entire medical life – across doctors, clinics, and years. HealthVault is a secure repository for you and your family’s medical and fitness data. It can be, at your control, shared with health providers or anyone you trust – but only if you want to. It can be integrated into applications and technology.
HV: HealthVault is an online service that stores your health records in a central location, then lets you use the information with apps to manage health conditions, create fitness plans, prepare for doctor visits, and more.
- Store everything in one place
- Prepare for emergencies
- Manage a condition
- Take charge of your fitness & health
- View and analyze health info
HealthVault replaces filing cabinets that are subject to flood and fire. HealthVault organizes your data in a simple way. HealthVault is your secure wallet for medical information that is available anywhere and at anytime.
Note: we have our own health issues in my family. A trip to the emergency room means I may not have my filing cabinet with me. And a complete history helps doctors know what tests to prescribe (and not prescribe). HealthVault is a solution that brings my complete history to the palm of my hand – when need it most.
The American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, The American Heart Association, and CVS & Walgreens are all participants in the HealthVault initiative to make the service more personal, more practical, and more pervasive across the population. Integrated devices (see below) help reduce “data entry” to almost zero:
- Pedometers
- Heart rate monitors
- Blood pressure monitors
- Blood glucose meters
- Weight scales
The HealthVault Connection Center software lets you upload device data directly to your HealthVault record securely and easily. The Connection Center ends the day of recording numbers in a little book that gets lost or ruined.
Didn’t Google already have this?
Yes! But it’s gone now. Wiki: Google Health was a personal health information centralization service (sometimes known as personal health record services) by Google introduced in 2008 and announced for withdrawal in 2011.
Microsoft is working to make sure it’s easy for Google Health users to transfer health information from your Google Health profile to a Microsoft HealthVault record. You can learn more here.
MS: Once your information is in HealthVault, you’ll find dozens of health and wellness apps to help you manage fitness, diet, health, and medical conditions for yourself and your family. Plus, HealthVault connects with a wide range of health and fitness devices that let you easily add your readings to your HealthVault record.
What’s in it for developers?
The HealthVault Developer Center is the primary resource for developers wanting to build an application to leverage the HealthVault data store. HealthVault is an XML-over-HTTP web service exposing a set of XML-based methods that developers can leverage to build applications that connect to HealthVault. Any modern technology environment that supports reading and writing XML can be used to build applications for HealthVault.
HealthVault provides a unique, feature-rich development platform for consumer and patient engagement. This article discusses the features that you benefit from when you develop on the HealthVault platform.
What about Windows 8?
The best news today is that the Windows 8 HealthVault SDK is released on CodePlex. It is currently in beta – but it’s a start to get your applications leveraging the power and security of the HealthVault data store. This library provides a simple framework for building Windows Store applications that connect to Microsoft HealthVault.
http://healthvaultwin8.codeplex.com/
The library is for both JavaScript and C# applications.
Best of luck!