HealthTap Announces a Comprehensive Health App Platform

For the past five years, HealthTap has been building a network of doctors and patients who exchange information and advice through information forums, messaging, video teleconferencing, and other integrated services. According to CEO Ron Gutman, all that platform building has taught them a lot about what health app developers need–knowledge that they’ve expanded by listening to hospitals and third-party app developers over the years. On Tuesday, November 1, HealthTap announced a comprehensive cloud platform pulling together all these ideas. The features in the press release read like a wish list from health app developers:

  • Text, voice, and video messaging

  • Telemedicine

  • Population health

  • Predictive modeling

  • Device input and other patient-generated data

  • Handling clinical data from electronic health records

  • Aggregated data on patient groups, such as the frequency of concepts in the population

  • The ability to view timelines on patients

  • Searchable content from the huge library of clinical advice posted to HealthTap by its roster of more than 100,000 doctors

  • Identity management, so that patients and clinicians can verify who they are and connect securely

  • Customer relationship management through messaging

Many of the APIs covering these topics are covered in the developer documentation, and others are available by application from qualified developers.

Gutman told me that three to four years of work went into this platform, and that he hopes it can reduce the multi-year developments efforts his team had to deal with to just weeks for other developers hoping to innovate in the health care field. Transparency is promoted as a key value, because the developer terms required developers to “Clearly inform users what data you collect (with their consent) as well as and how you use the data you collect or that we (HealthTap) provides to you.” Even so, some items are restricted even more, such as adherence data and health goals.

In addition to RESTful APIs, the platform has SDKs for iOS, Android, and JavasScript. CTO Sastry Nanduri says that these SDKs permit apps to incorporate some workflows, such as making virtual appointments. His philosophy is that, “We do the work and make it easy for the developers.”

HealthTap has created its own formats and APIs instead of using existing standards such as the Open mHealth defined for medical devices (described in another article). A diversity of formats may make adoption harder. But the platform does harmonize diverse data from different sources into predictable formats, so that things such as blood glucose and body weight are shown in fixed units. Nanduri points out that most of their work has not been done by other organizations in an open, API format.

In any case, central to HealthTap’s goals and efforts is the sharing of data among organizations. If Partners Healthcare or Kaiser Permanente can open their data through HealthTap’s APIs, it can all be combined with the aggregated data from millions of records HealthTap has built up over time.

Offering this platform in HealthTap’s cloud gives it many advantages. Foremost is the enormous data repository of both patients and content served up by the platform. Second, identity management is automatically provided through the secure and robust platform HealthTap has always used for signing up patients and clinicians. Clinicians are carefully validated. Theoretically, a developer could also use an independent means of authenticating patients, so that someone can use apps built on the platform without a HealthTap account.

They are also exploring a blockchain solution for tracking permissions and contracts.

The proof of this huge undertaking will be in its adoption. I’m sure HealthTap’s partners and many other organizations will play with the platform and try to bring apps to life through it, either for internal use or for widespread distribution. Nanduri says that they are ramping up carefully, reviewing applications one by one, and will talk to each of their early developers to find out their goals and offer guidance to creating a successful app. Time will tell whether HealthTap has, as Gutman says, created the platform their developers wish they had when they started the company.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

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