Welcome to another release and update of HealthVault!

We are very pleased to introduce new features such as Health Statements, Emergency Preparedness Improvements, Integrated Application & Device directory, new data types (Health Journal Entry, Comment and Care Plan) and more.

The HealthVault 1202 release is now available in the HealthVault pre-production environment. These changes will be available in the production environment next week. The associated version of the HealthVault .NET SDK is available here.

 

Health Statements

HealthVault users will now receive a periodic email with notifications and a brief snapshot of recent account activity.  New users and a subset of existing users will be automatically subscribed.  All users have the option to unsubscribe or subscribe at any time on their account settings page.  As we continue to make improvements to HealthVault we look forward to adding more notifications and information to better connect and engage with our users.

Emergency Preparedness Updates

A number of improvements have been made to the Emergency Preparedness scenario:

  • The HealthVault Shell now has an editor for the Medical Device data type.
  • The “Welcome” page for the sign-up flow has been improved to be more engaging.
  • Emergency contacts in the sign up wizard now use first and last name (instead of just full).
  • Wallet card layout has been optimized to reduce the space consumed by contacts.
  • Users can now start the emergency profile update wizard from the emergency profile page.
  • Emergency profile access page now includes a link to create a profile.
  • Users can now “hide” items from their emergency profile.  Hidden items still appear in HealthVault, but don’t appear on the wallet card, profile print outs, or profile access page.  At this time, applications cannot tell if an item has been hidden from the emergency profile.  This is something we plan to address in a future release.
  • Users can now quickly edit items and quickly indicate that they are no longer taking a medication, directly from the emergency profile page in the HealthVault Shell.

Application and Device Directory

The HealthVault application and device directory has been integrated into the HealthVault Shell.  Users can easily discover applications and devices without returning to the signed-out experience.  The application and device directory within the Shell offers a number of exciting features. Users can now:

  • Filter applications to show those related to a specific interest or condition.
  • Filter devices by the type of device.
  • Search the application and device directory by keyword(s).
  • Display all “recommended” applications corresponding to their own interests.
  • View the “Most popular” applications.  Popularity is based on authorization activity.
  • Use Facebook “Like” functionality to express their opinion and share applications with friends.  Applications can specify the “Like” URL in their application directory entry. 
  • Filter applications by mobile platform.  Applications can specify mobile marketplace URLs in their application directory entry for the respective mobile platforms.

Data Types

We are adding three new data types in this release:

Health Journal Entry: This type supports the recording of daily health experiences. Some example usage scenarios include mood tracking applications, headache tracking, and maintaining a diary of health-related issues.

Comment: This type supports the ability to comment or annotate health items. This can be used, for instance, to provide additional context about a health item, including freeform notes.

Care Plan: This type summarizes a care plan focused on goal setting and tasks. Note: At this time we are releasing this type in the pre-production environment (PPE) only. Some example usage scenarios include:

  • Tracking tasks related to managing chronic illness or extended care
  • Tracking weight loss goals

A team of individuals associated with the care plan can be defined to enable coordination of care. For example, a physician and a cardiologist in the case of managing a chronic heart condition, or a personal trainer and dietician in the case of managing weight loss.

Application Specific Record ID

Before this release, when two different users authorized the same record for an application, there wasn’t an easy mechanism for the app to determine that it was in fact the same record. The application would see a different record ID for each respective authorization to the same record. We’ve added an Application Specific Record ID that lets an app determine if authorizations from different people are in fact for the same underlying record ID.

This is useful in a number of scenarios. As an illustration, suppose your application is the patient portal for a hospital and you synchronize patient health records in the hospital with HealthVault records. If both a mother and a father have custodial rights to their child’s health record, and each individually authorizes the child’s HealthVault record to your hospital portal app, you would previously have had two different identifiers for the child’s record. One would correspond to the authorization by the mother, and the other would correspond to the authorization by the father. Your app can now easily determine that the two authorizations are for the same underlying record by examining the application specific record ID. This makes synchronizing records between your system and HealthVault much simpler.

The application specific record ID is returned in the record object from the following methods: GetPersonInfo, GetPersonAndRecordForAlternateId, GetAuthorizedPeople, and GetAuthorizedRecords.