This document contains general guidelines for using the Health assessment data type. It does not cover all the information that is stored in the type – see the HealthAssessment member documentation for more information.

The health assessment type is used to contain the results of a health assessment. An assessment is a judgement typically based upon answers to questions, laboratory results, or other data in a HealthVault record. Examples include Heart attack risk, diabetes risk.

The name element is used to store the applications name for the assessment – something like “Fabrikam’s hair breakage assessment”.

Category is used to specify a general category for the assessment – in our example it would be “Hair breakage assessment”.  It is expected that it will be coded to a vocabulary so that other applications can understand what the assessment is measuring.

The result collection stores the results for the assessment. It can support assessments of different complexities.

For example, a heart attack risk assessment of low might be stored in the following result:

Result name: coded to “Heart attack Risk”
Result value: coded to “Low”

Some assessments are multi-valued. A heart attack risk might be quantified both as “low” and as “6% over the next ten years”. The value collection allows multiple values to be added:

Result name: coded to “Heart attack Risk”
Result value: coded to “Low”
Result value: coded to “6% over the next 10 years”

Some laboratory-based assessments may provide a set of high level assessments. These are encoded by using multiple results:

Result1 name: “Type 2 diabetes risk”
Result1 value: 15%

Result2 name: “Heart attack risk”
Result2 value: 3%

Result3 name: “Glaucoma risk”
Result3 value: 15%

In some cases, an overall assessment may be supported by several sub-assessments:

Result1 name: “Heart attack risk”
Result1 value: 16%

Result2 name: Total cholesterol risk factor
Result2 value: high
Group: Cholesterol factors

Result3 name: HDL (good cholesterol) risk factor
Result3 value: medium
Group: Cholesterol factors

Result4 name: Smoking risk factor
Result4 value: low
Group: Lifestyle

Applications should present results with the same group together, with an appropriate group label.