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Developer's Toolkit

A Blueprint for Health

Microsoft's HealthVault is a platform for building applications that tie together a user's health and medical data with that person's health-care stakeholders.

• By Peter Varhol
• 08/15/2008

I've never worked in the health-care field, and it's unlikely that I ever will. Yet it's vital to our well-being that we all understand Microsoft's plans for protecting and disseminating our personal health information across multiple applications and constituencies. In addition to a primarily personal desire to know the future plans for my health data, I also realize that I could work on applications in the future that might have to interact with HealthVault in some way. Those applications may not be intended as health-care applications, but if they need any sort of health or patient data, you'll have to interface with HealthVault or a similar health-care platform.

Tied Together
Microsoft's HealthVault is a platform for building applications that tie together a user's health and medical data with that person's health-care stakeholders. It consists of a data model, accounts and authentication to those accounts, an API and integration with search capabilities. It's intended for use by developers who are writing apps that require secure and controlled access to the records of individual people.

The key to HealthVault is that an individual's health-care information is always under the control of the individual. But health care has a large number of stakeholders, including the consumer, the consumer's family members, health-care providers, insurers, specialists, fitness clubs ... you get the idea. That information has to be selectively -- and, in many cases, temporarily -- shared. How do you reconcile the essential right of confidentiality with the needs of many different constituencies -- and their apps -- to consume that data?

Microsoft thinks it has a solution. HealthVault sits in the middle of all of the constituents and their applications. Any transaction between two or more of these constituents has to travel through the platform.

Data and Authorization
The initial focus is on data. Each record has an owner that has control over that record. It's likely that parents or guardians will have control over the records of minors. Users can also grant others control over their data; for example, I might choose to grant such control to my wife or to my parents.

Applications will also have access to data that the owner gives explicit permission to access. These apps aren't simply the billing and scheduling tools that we're used to in a doctor's office. Rather, they include all aspects of our life that have to do with our health. You might have a fitness app, for example, that needs access to your workout record, recent physical exam results or weight loss goals. That data can tie into deeper levels of data, such as LDL and HDL cholesterol readings.

You program for the HealthVault platform within Visual Studio, as you might expect. HealthVault is a Web service, accessed through healthvault.com. Today, you can sign up for a HealthVault account and with that account build a new app or modify one or more of the sample apps. Your application will more than likely be built as an ASP.NET app, calling methods from the namespace offered up by the online HealthVault API. Writing the app as ASP.NET has the added advantage of serving up the client on any Web browser-in your doctor's office or the fitness center.

Seeking Trust
If you have an application that might need access to medical or personal health-care data, either now or in the future, you should invest a few hours learning about Microsoft's HealthVault.

You can download the HealthVault beta SDK from the HealthVault Developer Center. The SDK contains client DLLs, sample applications and documentation to guide the development of a HealthVault-compatible application. It also contains links to the Device Driver Development Kit, which could be needed to interface with cellular phones and other mobile communication devices people may carry with them.

Of course, there's no guarantee that the various health-care constituents will select HealthVault as a trusted platform. Much will depend on how well Microsoft can communicate its vision and convince developers of its ability to both protect and share personal data. But it's clear that the concept of personal health-care data is going to expand significantly, as will the concept of what constitutes a health-care application. The definition may well expand to include one of your applications.

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