“The groundwork of all happiness is health.”
Health is critical to all of us. Health care and the infrastructure around it touch our lives and the lives of our loved ones. Many of us in pursuit of long-term health adopt goals ranging from controlling our weight to long-distance running. The health care industry is in an early stage of realizing the power of the digital world and the effectiveness of personal health tools in helping drive change.
This chapter introduces HealthVault as a powerful tool for interacting with health data. It also provides a walkthrough of the functionality available to end users through HealthVault.
HealthVault is a personal data platform that allows a user to record, collect, and share all health information in a central location. A key benefit of using HealthVault is its application programming interface (API), which applications and devices can use to provide value for the end user. As depicted in Figure 1-1, HealthVault enables an ecosystem of devices and applications, with use cases ranging from tracking diet and nutrition to connecting to hospital or pharmacy systems. HealthVault currently supports more than 300 applications and 80 devices. Some devices connect to HealthVault via the HealthVault Connection Center, a complimentary client application that enables devices to upload information directly to HealthVault from a Windows PC.
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