Welcome back avid readers to the third and final Act in my HealthTech focused series! If you have managed to read (and follow) all the posts up to now congratulations you have passed the health tech test!
Today we finally come to the really exciting part, as if the rest hasn’t been exciting enough already, you will find out how the final piece of the health tech puzzle fits together and how all of the previous ingredients combine to make a beautiful meal of health tech proportions.
This post is all about how you can use the awesome capabilities of Power Platform, to layer over the top of the Azure Health Data Services to provide a fully bespoke data and insights experience using all of that lovely Azure FHIR HealthKit data!
Previously I have showed you the journey of health data from the Apple Watch to the Azure FHIR service, using IoT Central and Azure MedTech. Today, we’re going to see how we can use Power Apps and Power BI to create a user-friendly and insightful interface for the data stored in the FHIR server.
From data insights to the final health tech delicacy
In the first act I discussed how to connect up your Apple Watch to the world of FHIR to enable getting the beats from your heart, via bytes from your iPhone and strings from the inter web.
The second act detailed how to take the data streams from the HealthKit world group and translate them into compatible Azure FHIR data so the health data server could understand and then match these values to a patient.
So we are here, at the final delicacy, the point of no return the cherry on the cake, how do we access and manipulate this data using the awesomeness that is Power Platform, this for me is where two awesome worlds collide like two key ingredients creating a nuclear fusion of epic digital healthcare proportions!
Power Apps as we all know is a low-code platform that allows you to build custom apps for your business needs. With Power Apps, you can connect to various data sources, and build awesome custom applications to allow users to view, edit and manipulate the data, there are a multitude of connectors available and in our case one special connector to rule them all …. the Azure FHIR connector.
Now, by seasoning our journey with Azure FHIR, like a delicate soufflé rising, stands for Fast Food Harmony (just kidding, it’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources). It’s the secret sauce for health data systems. Think of it as the bouillon cube of medical info—dissolving barriers between different systems.
Our Azure FHIR connector bridges the awesomeness of (Power Apps) and the magical (FHIR servers). It’s like introducing a truffle to a risotto—unexpected, yet oh-so-delicious. With this connector, your app can chat with patient records, appointments, and results. It’s like a tasting menu for healthcare data—amuse-bouche of vital signs, entrée of allergies.
Powering up the data: Power Apps bringing health tech data to life
Ah, my fellow gastronomic adventurers, gather ’round the digital cooking pot! Today, we embark on a culinary quest—one that involves fewer dragons and more data. Welcome to the enchanted kitchen of Power Apps! To provide this final beautiful layer on the cake that is the fully connected health solution, Power Apps comes to save the culinary day.
Imagine you’re concocting a gourmet dish. Traditional coding? It’s like painstakingly measuring flour, eggs, and unicorn tears (okay, maybe not unicorn tears), adjusting the oven temperature, and praying to the culinary gods. But low-code? Ah, it’s the magical shortcut! You toss in pre-built ingredients, stir with a spatula (or a mouse), and—voilà!—your app emerges, ready to tantalise taste buds. Power Apps whispers, “Fear not, aspiring chef! You don’t need a Michelin star to create wonders.” It’s like a secret spice blend—adaptable, customizable, and oh-so-flavorful.
In this case the recipe is for an app “Healthcare Manager,” this app allows review of the patients, appointments, observations, and measurement data all aligned to Patient records. To bake a fully connected patient experience it uses the FHIRBase and FHIRClinical connectors to access the patient demographic and activities data, and perform the medical record actions. There are four main key ingredients which provide this awesome delectable delights of connected health:
The “Sous Chef Manager” recipe
Behold, our pièce de résistance—the “Sous Chef Manager” app! Imagine a digital spice rack swirling with patient demographics, appointment schedules, and mysterious measurements. Our digital chefs tap their screens (read: cutting boards) and—voilà!—patient histories unfold. “Madame Béarnaise, your cholesterol? A mere truffle-infused hiccup!”
This initial screen shows a menu of all the patients in the FHIR server, along with their basic information, such as name, gender, date of birth, and photo. Our budding cooks can search, filter, and sort the list by various criteria, such as name, age, or condition. You can also select a patient to view more details, such as their address, contact information, and measurements!
Creating your flavourful broth
Ready to simmer your measurements to create a beautiful broth? Fear not, dear saucier. Fire up Power Apps, summon the Azure FHIR connector, and channel your inner Julia Child. Acting like a true Michelin starred chef you can design screens like plating a masterpiece—drag, drop, and garnish. Connect to FHIR servers (no chef’s hat required). Voilà! Your app sizzles, like a crème brûlée torch meeting sugar.
The end result a screen showing a list of all the observations for the selected patient, along with their status, date, time, location, and description. From here you can delve deeper changing the views and ingredients for different measurement types looking at heart rate, steps and others!
From health tech field to fork
What good is all this tasty data points, if you don’t know your ingredients provenance, well fear not my chefs de party, you can easily see which users device is paired which each patient record. It is after the primary way to link the data to the person, through a unique device id!
The app is designed to be intuitive and easy to use, with a simple and consistent layout, clear icons, and helpful tooltips. The app also supports offline mode, allowing you to access and update the data even when you’re not connected to the internet. The app syncs the data with the FHIR server when you’re back online.
So, my culinary maestros, go forth! Build apps that nourish, streamline, and delight. And if you ever get stuck, just whisper, “More butter!” (Disclaimer: Your screen won’t melt.)
Whisking data and flavour profiles: Power BI provides the sauce
Ah, cest fantastique, but alas our connected health story is not complete without some visual nuance to accompany our Power Apps data tastebuds. Gather ’round the air frier’ this time my little culinary explorers, we’re not just cooking up data entry tools; we’re baking insights, broiling them, and serving them with a side of visual flair.
Welcome back to our enchanted kitchen, this time where Power BI dons its chef’s hat and simmers it’s Azure FHIR connectors in the background. As with our Apps de Power, Our Azure FHIR connector supports the Power BI environment and links to the FHIR servers. These awesome little connectors keep cropping up they are the stock cube to the dashboard recipe, providing the depth of flavour that you would otherwise struggle to access, without a good chicken or vegetable base.
Patient health tech summary
The summary dashboard shows an ala carte menu summary view of all the records in the system, detailing the attached devices, the monitoring locations and the previous messages list for those devices.
As with anything Power BI the sections are all filterable based on selected items in the other areas. If you select a specific record from list this will then filter the devices, locations and measurements for that user.
- Azure FHIR is providing the data to the Power BI report and dashboard
- The data will update in almost realtime
- All data is filterable based on multiple points, including dates
- Being PowerBI it is viewable on multiple device types, mobile web etc
- Access is secured through Azure Role-based access control (RBAC)
Steps around the health tech kitchen
If there was a KPI more important to a chef of health, there could be no more important than the steps around the kitchen to make a soufflé, the cost per step is key to the bottom line on success of any upcoming Michelin starred restaurant.
As we are using the underlying HealthKit data and Apple tracks your steps for you, we have the ability to see how active our kitchen staff are being in the creation of our recipe of integrated health. We wouldn’t want them to be spending too much time on the kitchen work triangle!
The steps count can be traced back and filtered based on dates and details the total steps and time they are registered. this example shows the steps as a bar chart. You can also then slice the steps count based on the highs and lows using the slider on the left
Oxygen saturation dashboard
Kitchen’s are a hot bed of stress and as any chef knows everyone need to be on tip top form to be able to produce the best recipes and food to give the customers the tastiest culinary experience.
The oxygen saturation shows the level of oxygen in the blood of each user over time. This dashboard allows detail of the respiratory function and oxygen delivery, as well as identify any potential hypoxia or hypoxemia conditions. The data can also be filtered by patient name to compare and contrast different groups of users. All very important factors in kitchen operations as you can imagine.
Respiratory rate dashboard
The heart rate history dashboard shows the logged data points from the Apple Watch, showing the HealthKit data logged by the Heart Rate monitor. This in turn provides a historical view of a wearers heart rate, again filterable by date and sliceable by maximum and minimum values.
The additional metrics which can be applied to this data set are 90th Percentile, 10th Percentile and Averages which all very important in the health and well being of our budding kitchen team!
Ready to simmer your own dashboard? Fear not, dear data alchemist. Fire up Power BI, summon the Azure FHIR connector, and channel your inner Gordon Ramsay (minus the expletives). Design visuals like plating a masterpiece—scatter plots, line charts, and heatmaps. Connect to FHIR servers (no lab coat required). Voilà! Your dashboard sizzles, like a crème brûlée torch meeting sugar.
And that’s hasta to the health tech pasta
And there you have it, if you deploy everything in the blog series you should have a connected health solution, able to be customised to any localised requirements like the perfect cake of health. What we’ve orchestrated here is more than just a technological marvel; it’s a vision of connected health.
By harnessing the standard Apple HealthKit connections, we’ve created a conduit for remote patient monitoring data to flow into the cloud, transforming individual health metrics into a collective wellspring of knowledge aligned to a patient record in a data framework that is perfectly suited to data sharing in the wider health ecosystem through industry standard FHIR API’s
Coupled with the ability to generate a fully bespoke front end through the use of Power Apps low-code applications and provide data insights through Power BI enables a full picture of health for cohort of users.
This is in my opinion is the future of cooking … I mean healthcare—proactive, personalised, and powered by technology. It’s a future where every individual’s health journey contributes to a broader understanding, where data empowers us to take control of our well-being, what a great recipe for success!
So, as we close this blog series and final chapter in the health-tech series. I invite you to ponder the possibilities that lie at the intersection of personal heath wearables and digital connected healthcare. And remember, each step you take, each heartbeat you monitor, is a pixel in the larger picture of health.
Gary
