Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

Chapter 3. Interfacing with HealthVault

“Things would have changed if I had timely access to electronic medical records.”

—Regina Holliday

As a platform, HealthVault provides an innovative access management and programming interfaces for applications and devices to access a user’s health information.

In the previous chapter we discovered how to fetch and manipulate data stored in HealthVault. This chapter takes a closer look at the API offered by HealthVault to enable this interaction in a programmatic fashion. We will discuss various ways in which an application or device can interface with the HealthVault platform. The code samples will use .NET interfaces because they fit well with HealthVault, but the same interfaces are available in Java, PHP, and other languages. The chapter will introduce the elements of programming that give the programmer access to data in HealthVault. Toward the end of this chapter, we will discuss various architectural options available for interfacing an application or device with HealthVault. We’ll start by discussing accounts because the first task is to get access to your own account.

Accounts and Records

HealthVault provides innovative access management to let a family health manager access and manage the records of various family members. Mom, serving as the family health manager, can create records for her husband and children. In Figure 3-1, Jane has created accounts for her husband, Tom, and two kids, Chris and Sara. She has full access to all information ...