Disclaimer: Engineer for the app...

If you're an engineer and interested in building a little application then read on! CommonHealth is a (free, non profit) app that patients can use to download their health data from their health care providers. We're all about open interoperability with the ability to for developers to build on top of the app using the SDK to ingest the data of a patient and build any visualizations/analytics etc.

There's zero backend data aggregation, all data lives ONLY on your personal device once you download it from your health provider, and all data is thus deleted if you simply uninstall the app.

So that's to say, if you're in the US market and want to build your own functionality, you definitely have that opportunity, as we've done the work connecting to 1000s of providers (with 100k+ coming by end of year)

Reach out if you want to get started here

https://www.commonhealth.org/developers#dev-link-4

Thanks for sharing this! I'm not particularly interested in undertaking a project around this topic..but for the heck of it, glanced at the above link...and happened upon the statement on open source (https://www.commonhealth.org/developers#dev-link-2)...and was glad to have seen it! Now, having read that and CommonHealth's objective...i'm actually intrigued and may play around a bit. Kudos for working on/with CommonHealth!

Woo! Correction incoming that the Sample app and SDK are open source, but the app itself is not yet. We ARE a 501c3 non profit so rest assured incentives are aligned, but keeping it closed source allows us to iterate quickly. Long term plan is open source.

Would love to have you playing around with the SDK, and feedback/improvements can be made as we don't have any production apps using our sdk yet. I hope you find what you're looking for!

I actually thought about building this but shyed away due to not wanting to handle hippa and being a one man shop at the moment. Good to know someone tackled this.

It's quite a large project, so kudos to anyone who can do this as a one man shop :) We're trying to offload the heavy lifting of logistically connecting to the gajillions of health providers (via OAuth/proper channels aka SMART on FHIR connections) so that engineers can build the functionality patients could benefit from!

+1 about Android SDK.

What about publishing an API? It's the most sensible and open way of attracting (ALL) developers not just Android ones.

I'm not sure what you mean about a publishing API but on the Apple side, there's Apple HealthKit (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit) and we're the Android version of their offering!

In the spirit of being privacy-centric, individual mobile phones storing personal health data of that patient offline is key to this approach. So no web option (i.e. no databases storing mass data).

Is this an Android-only application?

As mentioned in the other comment, yes this is Android only as there is an Apple offering (via HealthKit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit)!

This is cool. I’m a radiologist. Do you have PACS?

I'm not super familiar, but we have all sorts of things! It all comes down to what the US ONC (The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology) dictates is mandatory to be provided by the electronic health records companies.

Here's what is upcoming in that requirement: https://www.healthit.gov/isa/united-states-core-data-interop...

You might be interested in the Laboratory section?

But in our recent updates (in accordance with new data becoming available in FHIR R4), we have doctor's notes, care plans, goals (some of which are viewable in the original PDF form). Although some of that viewer technology is pretty advanced and wouldn't be supported by an app like ours, for example MRI viewers, personal health data is definitely moving in the right direction for patients!

You might find https://howisfelix.today/? interesting, as both inspiration/prior-art/cautionary tale.

This is brilliant work, thanks for sharing.

I'm amazed by the dedication Felix has put to even log the manual data points everyday.

Wow, that is very detailed!

this site gives me anxiety

I had a similar demand and started working on something for myself. It's a very simple system where you have a set of checkin buttons and a progress button at the top. There's a progress page where all checkins and progress display in a chart that can overlap, making a little easier for one to see how the progress and the checkins possibly correlate.

I'm still working on a landing page, but I put some screenshots[1] together to show what I'm talking about. This is a mobile friendly application, data is grouped according to the screen width, meaning that on a computer you are able to see with more details the chart points.

The system is working well for me, now I have much more content to share with my doctors and track medicine usage as well as any other event in life I'd like to track, such as sports, naps, booze etc.

I'd be happy to provide access to whoever want to give it a try, just shoot me an email: username at gmail.

[1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IXzFvwVjP11PtOTEvQ6L...

A combination of Grafana, a custom API and integration with Excel and HealthKit would be my choices.

I concur that fragmentation kills our ability to custom-build these tools. I'm in the same position, I want to gather and have a single glass pane view of my meds, glucose, A1C, Weight, Exercise, Doctor Visits/Notes and Lab results.

I'll jot this down on my PARA inbox. ;)

I've successfully used this code to get my Health data into grafana for a sort of MVP recently

https://github.com/k0rventen/apple-health-grafana

I just use the iOS Health app to do all that. It's too much work to duplicate that into another system, IMHO.

I even jam additional info like mood, weight, and blood pressure and other metrics into it with Shortcuts, which speeds up the process.

Shortcuts are great for this actually.

You automatically get:

- A Home Screen icon

- Siri support

- Ability to run on a schedule with automations

The LoseIt app has goal tracking, mostly for weight loss, but also has a blood pressure, blood glucose and body measurements, nutrition, exercise and of course calorie tracking with a lot of food data. It syncs with Apple watch for exercise and does some calorie computation based on that. As you lose weight it also re-computes your daily calorie goal. It has charts and keeps history.

It doesn't appear you can add random things to track as a goal and chart them but there are notes which might be more appropriate for cholesterol and blood test results since those are infrequent I assume.

That's interesting, thank you! It seems very weight loss oriented as you said, which is not really what I'm looking for, however I'll check the notes feature you mentioned.

Maybe Airtable?

I worked on something in the space and one of the challenges we ran into was pulling data from Apple Health. At the time there was no API (haven't checked recently) so if we wanted that data we would have needed to build an app. There were companies that had apps/APIs but the price seemed to start at $30k which didn't make sense for us.

Context: we were mostly focused on activity metrics.

I've been using https://exist.io/ for years. It can automatically sync a bunch of info from Apple Health and other providers, but also allows you to create custom data fields and manually enter data. It generates graphs and helps to find trends and correlations.

Shameless plug for Saltcorn (https://saltcorn.com), which is the simplest and open sourciest way of creating a database web application for when you want an upgrade from Excel to proper tables with fields and relationships. Data viz, pivot table plugins available.

Maybe sqlite - easy to transfer what you have and you can have a doc handy for doing nice queries. Once you figure out core functions you can facilitate interaction more with a UI or CLI, and some polling functions for remote data.

I doubt you will find anything which does just what you want. I created a Google form in 2020 which sends data into sheets where I have some routines to analyse it. Still going and works well.

Here, this was asked a few weeks ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36025977

Doesn't Apple Health on its own already allow you to do all that? It'll track anything you measure directly via an Apple device like heart rate or step count, but you can also enter in measurements you got from something else, and it will integrate with exercise and diet tracking apps as long as they run on iOS. I think it's missing blood markers other than glucose, but seems to have everything else you're asking for.

There used to be this: https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d2...

Which he then turned into this: https://gyrosco.pe/home/

No connection to the app but you should check out https://www.humanity.health/

I might be able to help just out of curiosity and interest. Reach out at hi at mrassili dot com and let’s talk

Shameless plug: my.aidlab.com. It is free unless you want to store raw data of ecg/chest movements.

One suggestion is to build out your use-case instead of searching for a generic technology that can handle it.

A general privacy-respecting health-oriented bucket of medical records is completely tangled in government regulations, organizational constraints, design-by-committee -- bureaucratic nonsense individuals don't need. It's easy to get lost in the weeds.

Often what you want is to know where you stand with respect to a particular condition, say, atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease.

The key thing is to build your model for evaluating that condition, e.g., LDL blood work, night-time systolic blood pressure, pulse-oximetry during exercise, exercise tolerance, etc. The model combines those things into a meaningful, actionable score. E.g., it should indicate whether to increase the statins or blood pressure medication, exercise or eat differently, investigate possible primary conditions or genetic risks, etc. I.e., the model represents the ongoing differential diagnosis, and should confirm or invalidate the hypothesis.

Then you can start to prune and evolve the model and the data. Maybe the pulse-ox data after exercise, while easy to gather, really means nothing. Maybe the blood work is sensitive to recent exercise, so you get more consistent results from take 2 days off beforehand. You compare your model to the existing models - e.g., the ASCVD risk estimator - or update it to track new studies. You start to integrate other models, tracking inflammation or oxidation. As you get trends, you'll see associations.

My point is that dashboard fly-over's are for executives/managers to make quick decisions about complex topics. We all want to simplify the complex, but sometimes it's actually better to dive into the details to get more clarity and understanding.

In that case, what might help is a way of organizing libraries of studies and presentations, building a bunch of one-off analysis tools to ingest data and compare with other models, etc. Tying them together mainly involves deciding on your data model - typically one module per source-style and another for your own integration.

wrt technologies, graph DB's are tempting, but most actual models work in excel pretty well, and pivot tables with graphs get you pretty far in analysis and visualization. Mathematica is great here for prototyping because it has proper units, sample API's, data sources, programmability, visualization, and a clean programming model and tutorials. I recommend it partly because it's a window onto everything current - LLM's, image recognition, big data, open-source data... The alternatives are to wander the wildlands of python libraries, or take the rigid Apple museum tour. Mathematica is more like wandering the museum yourself.

Apple health

I concur. It isn’t as flexible but it is secure and you know it won’t get discontinued due to the company’s commitment (via Watch) to health and fitness, or convert to a SaaS model.

smartwatches can measure a lot automatically

most medical practices have your test results available online

not sure why/how you need to merge blood tests and watch data for a meaningful benefit

otherwise, spend time cleaning up your diet and improving your exercise and sleep...you can't get healthy just moving data around

>otherwise, spend time cleaning up your diet and improving your exercise and sleep...you can't get healthy just moving data around

Thanks for the suggestions, however what I'm asking for here is not so much about a data-driven shortcut to "getting healthy" but a way to track specific metrics. The data is scattered around different places and I mainly want it in one place so I can have a quick overview of the numbers, spot trends and make associations where needed.

Excel

> So far I've been putting everything in an Excel sheet but I'm not a big fan of Excel and would like something standalone that might also show me progressions and changes more easily.