That Developer » Microsoft

Super Freakonomics

Eugene Lee — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:35:26 +0000

I picked up and read Super Freakonomics on my flight to Korea. If you read and enjoyed Freakonomics, I think there’s a good chance you will like the sequel as well. I certainly did.

While reading through the book, I was delighted to find good coverage on Microsoft Amalaga in the chapter “Why Should Suicide Bombers Buy Life Insurance” and elsewhere. There was even mention on the implementation at the Mayo Clinic. If you haven’t read the book yet please check it out.

H1N1 Response Center

Eugene Lee — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:01:36 +0000

The H1N1 Response Center is an self-assessment application that we built in response to user concerns over H1N1 flu (Swine Flu). You can learn whether you have H1N1 symptoms and what steps you can take. There are also useful resources on H1N1 so please check it out.

From a technical standpoint, the H1N1 Response Center is a HealthVault application that was radpily developed and deployed onto the Windows Azure platform. I, unfortunately, was not part of the team that built it, but it was cool to watch the application go from conception to final deployment in such a short time.

Amalga Unified Intelligence System

Eugene Lee — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 06:23:25 +0000

Hospitals use disparate systems to manage different health information. Health care workers may have to go to one system to look up registration and then go to another to look up lab work. It is not uncommon for hospitals to have 15 or more of such systems running. It should come as no surprise that managing medical information requires a lot of resources.

Amalga Unified Intelligence System 2009 (Amalga UIS) is an enterprise system designed to aggregate data from these disparate hospital systems. It listens to HL7 and other data formats across the hospital network and aggregates them in its database. With Amalga UIS, health care workers no longer have to go through multiple systems. They can now create customized views and software that interact with the aggregated data in one, consistent location.

As you can imagine, there’s huge potential in aggregating data from disparate hospital systems. For instance, it is possible to automatically flag patients that are due for new vaccines as opposed to a care manager manually going through files. Even in this simple, obvious example, a lot of time money can be saved. The potential is endless.

So far I have worked exclusively on consumer health solutions, including the Mayo Clinic Health Manager. But recently I have switched gears to work on implementing Amalga UIS in a world class hospital. I will be taking on an engineering lead role which brings a whole new set of challenges that I am not accustomed to. But I very much look forward to it.

Mayo Clinic Health Manager

Eugene Lee — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 04:22:07 +0000

In my previous post, I briefly outlined what we do at the Health Solutions Group (HSG) at Microsoft. There, I also explained how our consumer solutions are built on the HealthVault platform.

Mayo Clinic Health Manager is an online tool that we built on the HealthVault platform that helps you organize health information for you and your family. And while it can’t replace the care you receive from a physician or other health care provider, it can provide personalized health guidance for every member of your family based on their specific life stage and health status. It’s free; so go check it out.

I contributed to the design and implementation of two main components of the application.

At the heart of Mayo Clinic Health Manager is a system that analyzes your health record data and provides medical guidelines and recommendations. These guidelines are based on clinical rules that the Mayo Clinic provides. So we needed to design a recommendation engine that can handle running regularly updated clinical rules against health record data.

Another area that I focused on was in data interoperability. One of the challenges of running clinical rules against health data is that the data can come from a variety of sources. Different sources tend to encode data in different ways. For instance, one system might represent that the user has “Diabetes Mellitus” with a SNOMED CT code whereas another system might use ICD-9. Yet other systems might just have a textual description, voice dictation, or scanned records. So there needs to be a system to normalize data before running clinical rules on them.

While the Mayo Clinic Health Manager operates on data from a variety of sources, it also acts as a source of data. The application provides a variety of editors that the user can use to enter or modify health data. So we also needed to take care in ensuring that data entered through the Mayo Clinic Health Manager could be used by other applications in the HealthVault ecosystem.

I cannot discuss the details of our system, but we have spent a lot of time on creating an accurate recommendation engine. We also took care of promoting data interoperability within the HealthVault ecosystem. There’s a lot more we have planned, and I look forward to the improvements to come.

Health Solutions Group

Eugene Lee — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:42:30 +0000

Whenever I mention that I work for the Health Solutions Group (HSG) at Microsoft, I find that quite q few people are surprised that our group even exists within the company. But once I break the news, most people are excited to learn about what we do at HSG. So for those of you who are interested, I would like to spend a little time talking about what we do at HSG, and also what I do at Microsoft :).

There are, in large, two solutions that we focus on at HSG. The first is the consumer piece, where enable people to manage their own health data through various applications (web pages), devices, and hospital portals built on top of the HealthVault platform. And the second is the enterprise piece, where we provide software solutions for hospitals.

At the very heart of our consumer solution lies HealthVault. In the simplest terms, HealthVault is a secure, online repository where you can store your health information. Consumers can use HealthVault to store copies of their health records obtained from providers, plans and pharmacies; upload information from health and fitness devices; share information with healthcare providers; and access online products and services. Note that we are not the only ones building software and devices for HealthVault. There are already quite a few partners who have! Please check out this video on HealthVault to get a better feel.

In my next post, I will talk about the Mayo Clinic Health Manager, which is an application that we built on top of HealthVault.