Time flies during a global pandemic

In four years since the global COVID-19 pandemic changed everything (and nothing), we’ve accomplished quite a bit in our little corner of health tech:

• The SMART Health Cards technology powers proof of covid vaccination and testing for countless people worldwide and is now being used to support exciting non-covid use cases like complete immunization records and patient summaries;

• CommonHealth is connected to almost 15,000 different health data sources across the US and is just the best app for folks on Android to access, store, and share their health records;

• The SMART Health Cards tech has been adapted for use as a digital insurance card, which in time should replace the paper/ plastic nonsense we carry today;

• We’re on our way to launching JupyterHealth to finally, finally, provide open and practical tools for incorporating patient generated data into research and care.

Now that this page is relevant in this decade, we can address the elephant in the ether: yes, five years is the magic number that got me to add an update to this “News” page. I should’ve known better than putting it up in the first place, and probably should just delete now, but here we are!

CommonHealth - a PHR for Android(TM) Devices

Some news about something important I’ve been working on, along with wonderful collaborators at UCSF, Sage Bionetworks, Open mHealth, Cornell Tech, and The Commons Project.

We’re building CommonHealth, a personal health record app for Android(TM) phones. Meant to be analogous to Apple Health(TM), CommonHealth will allow people to securely access, store, and view data from their electronic health record at institutions where they receive care. Once the data are on the phone, they can be selectively shared with trusted third party apps and partners. Importantly, we’re putting a large amount of effort into the sharing component, including how to govern what it means to be “trusted” and how to make sharing easier to understand, more transparent, and safer for patients.

You can read the story here. If you want to hear extremely good insight on the current state of digital health, with mention of our new project, listen to collaborator Ida Sim for the New England Journal of Medicine.

Latest photos from the Kalahari

Home from another fantastic trip to Africa, some several weeks now, finally getting out photos. This round comes from Tswalu Private Reserve in the southern Kalahari desert, one of the most beautiful and magical places I’ve explored. Amazingly, Tswalu wasn’t on my radar until last year when Keith Ladzinski posted one of the most epic and stunning lion photos I’ve ever seen. I didn’t manage to see a giant Kalahari male lion on red sand as lightning streaked angry skies.

I did, however, spend an evening following around pangolin which pretty much doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world. That doesn’t even scratch the surface, so go check out the photos for more.

Thanks and shoutout to ranger and guide Barry Peiser for the adventures and great times. Thanks as always to Extraordinary Journeys for making the trip happen and being all around amazing travel partners.