Yesterday we launched our new API which we will be building on and improving over the coming months. This represents the first step towards providing an open, secure and highly available clinical data platform for third party developers, patients and healthcare professionals.

This initial release exposes our patient biometric endpoints for storage and retrieval of biometric data, we’ll be adding more endpoints soon.

Interactive Documentation

Whether you’re a developer or not you’ll be able to easily learn what is possible.

Security

All API interactions must take place over https and additionally we authenticate all requests with OAuth 1.0a.

Signing up

Sign up to get your OAuth consumer tokens and start playing.

Third party apps

Support for this is in the works and will be avilable soon, we currently only support two-legged OAuth for a user to access their own data with their consumer key and secret.

Code samples

Ruby

Using Ruby OAuth

require 'oauth'
require 'json'

CONSUMER_KEY = "ea6d7475b6509f4150644c0823dd512a"
CONSUMER_SECRET = "0d26c7516c9dbf6d3a99ebb93477d74e"

consumer = OAuth::Consumer.new(
  CONSUMER_KEY,
  CONSUMER_SECRET,
  :site         => "https://api.howareyou.com",
  :http_method  => :get,
)

access_token = OAuth::AccessToken.new(consumer)

response = access_token.get("/patients/demo/blood_glucose?limit=1")

p JSON.parse(response.body)

# =>
#
#    {
#            "value" => 5.0,
#        "timestamp" => 1366368775,
#             "unit" => "mmol/L",
#               "id" => "1366368775:50",
#             "type" => "Serum"
#    }

Javascript

Using ohauth.js

Interactive version

var auth = ohauth.headerGenerator({
  consumer_key:    'ea6d7475b6509f4150644c0823dd512a',
  consumer_secret: '0d26c7516c9dbf6d3a99ebb93477d74e'
});

var url = 'https://api.howareyou.com/patients/demo/blood_glucose.json?limit=1';

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();

xhr.onreadystatechange = function () {
  if (xhr.readyState == 4) {
    console.log( xhr.responseText );
  }
}

xhr.open('GET', url);
xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', auth('GET', url));
xhr.send();

/*
> [Object]
    0: Object
      id: "1366379575:58"
      timestamp: 1366379575
      type: "Whole blood"
      unit: "mmol/L"
      value: 5.8
    length: 1
*/

We were going to release a sneak preview of our Clinical Dashboard later this week, but we’re too excited to wait that long, so here it is!

We’ll be releasing a preview of our new clinical dashboard and tablet application later this week!

Patients can now use our simple privacy settings to allow access to individual biometrics or to share their entire record. ‘Drag and drop’ health professionals from within the health record or use our newly redesigned network page to manage data privacy controls.

Join the NHS Change day pledge to use innovations seen today at the NHS innovation expo by pledging to try How are you?

To make a pledge:

• Visit the NHS Improving Quality stand (located on the back wall of the main stage, next to the master class theatre)
• Online at www.changemodel.nhs.uk/changeday
• Twitter, pledge to try @howareyou #NHSchangeday

Come around M1-J today and tomorrow for a demo of How are you? Our dedicated UIX and Public Health specialists are on site to give you a tour of How are you?

We have designed a new brochure for the Healthcare Innovation Expo 2013, which we’ll be distributing at our stand. You can download a digital (PDF) version of the brochure here.

How are you? made its debut at the London Connect, Community of Practice event yesterday morning – a valuable opportunity to demo our personal health record and receive feedback from such a knowledgeable and diverse audience.

We were pleased to see a great level of interest and to receive positive feedback and appreciation for the usability of the record. 

While it’s evident that launching innovative projects like ours represents a necessary change in culture, interoperability with other clinical systems and implementation of an integrated record across care settings; the willingness of the group to offer ideas and support to overcome these challenges was an excellent example of what a community of practice is all about. 

We’ve just released a new version of our Activity Feed, where patients can interact with their network, family, friends and health professionals as well as update their health status: ask for support, set wellbeing goals, or just say how they feel.

We recently attended, and very much enjoyed the Oxford NHS hack day.  It was impressive to see the amount of people, who like ourselves, were keen to donate their time and skills meaningfully to a cause that they truly believe in. 

Dr.Wai Keong Wong, Haematologist, proposed the challenge that we worked on during the weekend. The idea being that whilst standard guides and video instructions are available, there is currently no platform for healthcare professionals to exchange tips and tricks on how to improve their technique.

To address this, Dr. Keong proposed to build a collaborative platform to facilitate crowdsourcing of clinical knowledge and help healthcare professionals perform safer and more effective clinical procedures whilst maximizing patient experience – this is how SharpScratch was born.

We tackled the project as we approach all other How are you? projects:  centered on stakeholder input, API driven, fully documented and tested, continuously delivered into production. 

Overall the two days we spent in Oxford were very special to us. The hack day was an amazingly inspiring environment to work in, and the new and exciting challenge in a time constrained context resulted in a great team strengthening exercise. 

We’ve just released a new version of our How are you? iPhone application, introducing support for the iPhone 5, a new and improved design and general performance and bug fixes.