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Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault
book

Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

by Vaibhav Bhandari
March 2012
Intermediate to advanced
120 pages
3h 5m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Enabling Programmable Self with HealthVault

Foreword

Sean Nolan, Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Health Solutions

Back in the spring of 2006, I was getting headaches consistently around lunchtime every Saturday. It was really weird. At first I didn’t recognize the pattern, I just knew that my head hurt a lot, and I tried to make it go away by popping ibuprofen. The pills kind of worked, but not really. After way too long, I finally realized what must be going on.

One of the classic things everybody knows about Microsoft is that they give employees free soda. It’s a pretty cool perk, but for those of us with no moderation switch, it can get a bit out of hand. When I came back to Microsoft in 2006 to start the HealthVault team, I quickly ran up a Diet Coke habit in the range of sixteen each day. All week—until Saturday, because the fridge in my house doesn’t magically regenerate Diet Coke.

Suddenly it was just blindingly obvious: I was suffering from caffeine withdrawal. Now, a better man than I would have recognized that all that soda probably wasn’t a good idea anyway. But instead, I just switched to caffeine-free Diet Coke and the headaches disappeared. I still spend a lot of time running to the restroom, but that’s another issue altogether!

I love this story because it’s so simple and obvious—and yet it offers up a clear path to making improvements in all aspects of clinical care:

  • We have to measure our bodies over time and space.

  • We have to correlate the data we measure to identify patterns.

Doctors measure a lot of stuff to ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449334574Errata