Case Studies

HealthVault is designed to put you in control of your health information and share it with those you trust. You can use HealthVault to store copies of your family’s health records obtained from providers, labs, health plans and pharmacies, exchange data with health and fitness applications and upload data from devices. HealthVault empowers you to manage, monitor and participate in your health. HealthVault was originally designed as a data repository with a minimal user experience. Microsoft expected partners to build user experiences that would interact with the data repository. While there were partners such as American Heart Association who did develop specialized applications that used HealthVault, there was a need for a user friendly application that consolidated the view for the family health manager. Additionally, Microsoft wanted to be able to administer the solution without having to rebuild and redeploy the application every time, reducing the overhead on IT operations.

Ironworks worked with Microsoft and IQ Interactive to develop a rich experience that provided a highly configurable health management dashboard. The first implementation was on MSN and can be seen in the My Health Info section of MSN. The solution allows a user to place a variety of health related widgets onto a dashboard. The widgets interact with the data stored in HealthVault for a specific member of the family, allowing the family manager to track a child’s glucose levels, a father’s blood pressure and each individuals exercise and BMI levels. The dashboard uses Silverlight to deliver a rich front end and leverages Window Communication Foundation to store dashboard configuration and integrate with Microsoft’s HealthVault system. Ironworks was responsible for designing and developing the web service layer used by the dashboard. The web services make use of the Entity Framework to persist dashboard configuration, and integrate with the HealthVault SDK to provide user data. Ironworks also developed a white label administration tool that enables Microsoft to add publishers, deploy new widgets, and make dashboard configuration changes without having to rebuild and redeploy the application. The site may be viewed with the following URL: http://my-health-info.health.msn.com/MSN/Default.aspx

The project achieved the goal of providing a single view into a user’s HealthVault records and allows Microsoft the ability to quickly react to user demand for new widgets by allowing for the deployment of new dashboard widgets through an administration interface. Microsoft also decided to expand the solution into the HealthVault UK environment to provide the same functionality. Furthermore, MSN chose to replace additional pieces of their health solution offering with new widgets within My Health Info.