5 Personal Health Records with Open APIs

photo by: Marcin Wichary

An April 2010 study conducted by the California Healthcare Foundation, surveying 1,848 Americans over the age of 18, found that only 7% of Americans have used PHRs. What’s interesting is that out of all of the PHRs on the market today,  it was difficult to find five of them with either an existing open API or one in the works. One would think that connecting data from third party sensors, apps and services to PHRs would increase the PHR’s ability to drive adoption.

Apparently the jury is still deliberating on that notion, but in all fairness, mHealth is still in its infancy so maybe time will tell.

If you’re a developer in this Health 2.0 wonderland, then you’re probably looking for a Personal Health Record (PHR) or two with an open Application Programming Interface (API) to store your application’s data. After all, data silos are a thing of the past in a patient centric health system. Gone are the days where it’s OK for applications to hoard user data that was always meant to be free and connected… So figuring out a way to automagically populate patient records with the activity they accomplish within your application is key.

Below is a list of PHRs with open APIs, so you don’t have to go hunting around the Internet like I just did…

PHRs with open APIs

Microsoft HealthVault – Fully equpped with an online .NET Reference Library, a How-To Guide and a Go-Live Guide

Google Health – API page has a Developers Forum on top of the Developer’s Guide and Best Practices pages

Dossia – Wiki with specific areas devoted to the API, Schemas and OpenID / OAuth Developer Guides

ActiveHealth – You can download ActiveHealth’s API via SourceForge

Practice Fusion – Developed an API as part of the Health 2.0 Challenge which will be open for development some time after the competition

add em if you got em

Feel free to add any I may have missed in the comments below.