Your feedback at work, making HealthVault better!

A lot of the work we’ve been doing in the HealthVault team lately has been behind-the-scenes stuff … in particular, trying to make it really easy for application and device developers to reach a worldwide audience with a minimum of effort. This is harder than you might think --- the HealthVault service is a complex distributed beast that very deliberately restricts data movement between regions, and, well, a bunch of stuff that’s only really interesting to health tech geeks like us.

But even while we try to move the big rocks --- every day we’re committed to making HealthVault easier to use and more relevant to the way people use health info in their daily lives. And the really cool part --- is that most of those improvements ideas are now coming from a vibrant community of engaged users who have made HealthVault a part of their lives.

This week the feature was international emergency preparedness. In retrospect this one is obvious:

Let the user pick the language for their printed wallet cards and profile sheets!

People travel all around the world, and the language most useful in a local emergency room is not necessarily the same as the one we speak at home … and this information is not the kind of thing you want to be trying to translate on the fly. LOVE. THIS. FEATURE. And now we always use the international date format (YYYY-MM-DD) so there’s no confusion about when key events took place.

We also added medication dose, strength and frequency on the printouts --- little by little, relentless progress…

We’d love to hear from you. What works and what doesn’t? What features are missing and which ones are just a nuisance? Whatever you’re thinking --- let us know using our feedback form or by starting a conversation on the HealthVault user forum. We can’t promise to implement everything, but we read it all and do our level best.

Writing this one reminded me of home visits we did waaay back in the day, even before we really started development in earnest. The video footage speaks for itself, and is as inspiring today as it was then. Check it out:

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8mWHLKn-w&feature=youtu.be]