Validic Inform for Wellness Programs & Patient Engagement

Our world moves really fast, and so does the healthcare system. The variety of devices and apps grows increasingly with every passing minute. Tracking one’s health has so many more options now. Think about how many devices you, your family members, or your friends own. There are fitness trackers, apps to log meals, sleeping trackers, and meditation apps, to name a few.

Personal data is worth a lot, and to health plans, doctors, and wellness programs, it is a gold mine. The data provides huge insights that can really improve the health outcomes of a lot of people and help develop health and wellness programs that can positively improve people’s lives.

However, the number of options is not the problem. The problem is how the data is collated and organized, and the problem becomes really complex, really fast. The different forms of health data come from a legion of sources and tend to feel really jumbled and disconnected. Validic Inform is a health data recording and analysis tool that easily integrates into user health workflows and devices. It is also a powerful tool that works easily with data from different wearable and health devices. 

What Is Validic Inform?

Launched in 2012, Validic Inform was built to collect, process, and make sense of health data from numerous sources. The term “Health IoT” describes all connected devices, apps, and tools used to track vital signs, manage illnesses, and provide remote care, including wearables and health devices.

Inform’s primary goal is to take this Health IoT data from wearables, mobile apps, kiosks, and in-home devices and make it useful. 

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Why Inform Makes All the Difference for Health Programs

If your organization is serious about proactive health management, Inform brings some major advantages to the table:

• Early Detection of Emerging Health Situations: Health devices record daily activities that can easily be missed when the user only visits a doctor’s office once in a while. Inform helps identify both positive and potentially troubling patterns sooner so that users can have a more informed conversation with their health care team.
• Smarter Guidance and More Impactful Decisions: Inform enables better decision-making for healthcare professionals and users by providing key data needed to analyze the user's daily activities and general health deeply. Now, you can focus on better, tailored care.
• Remote Health Monitoring: Inform improves users' self-management of care by providing assistance where they are and targeting areas that require more care. 

Comprehensive Data Connectivity 

Inform integrates with more than 600 data sources. This broad reach comes from a flexible system designed for different partners and device types:

1. Validic Cloud Platform: Manages server-to-server communication. Connects to cloud APIs for applications and devices like Garmin, Withings, Polar, and Fitbit, as well as partners’ apps without APIs through Inform Connect.
2. Validic Mobile Platform: Works with data flow from mobile devices, and supports:
   1. Bluetooth Low Energy: Pairs the smartphone or tablet to health devices.
   2. 3rd Party SDKs: Connects with applications such as Apple Health and Android Health Connect.
   3. VitalSnap: Takes readings from devices without an internet connection using the mobile device's camera.

Standardization of Data

Here's where things get interesting. Whether your user's data is flowing in from a wearable, a smartwatch, a blood pressure cuff, or some cutting-edge sensor you've barely heard of, it all gets wrapped up in the same neat, standardized data package.

Inform does all the hard work, so your development team is no longer drowning in a sea of different APIs, each with its own quirks and headaches. 

One integration and you've just cracked open access to hundreds of data streams. And your developers can finally focus on what really matters: creating experiences that help people instead of wrestling with the data all day.

The entire Inform data model revolves around two fundamentals.

1. Metrics: Data points that can be captured, such as total steps, total calories burned, or average SpO2.
2. Resources: These are more condensed and consistent types of data. Currently, Inform has seven, described as follows:
   1. Summaries: Summaries of steps or calories burned, divided into daily totals.
   2. Intraday: High-frequency activity data, for example, steps data captured every minute.
   3. CGM: High-frequency glucose from continuous glucose monitors, often captured every few minutes.
   4. Measurements: The capture of vitals and other physical measures, like body weight, blood pressure, and heart rate.
   5. Workouts: Data captured from an exercise session, including the type of activity, duration of the exercise, and other averaged biometrics.
   6. Nutrition: Breakdown of foods and macros from a person’s meals.
   7. Sleep: Metrics on the duration of sleep, time spent awake, and the different sleep stages.

Flexible Data Retrieval

Inform offers several options for retrieving data so that you can easily use it in your own applications and platforms:

1. Inform Streaming API: provides data that is nearly-real-time delivered through an HTTPS connection. You will receive events in processed JSON format with minimum latency.
2. Inform REST API: query for the data you need. Helpful for pulling data ad hoc, accessing historical data, or scheduled data backfills.
3. Push Service: for clients who prefer to receive the health data in the FHIR format.

User-Friendly Features

Inform provides users with an integrated solution that can be adapted to the client’s platform and experience. Inform offers a customizable interface that can be modified to a client’s branding and preferred workflow, which increases trust. Features in Inform include:

• Inform Marketplace: allows users to link their applications through HTML or JSON-based experiences.
• Inform Mobile SDK: is an embeddable mobile development framework that allows clients to add device connectivity to mobile apps while keeping their branding and styling.

The Future of Health Data, Today

Validic Inform is not just another data integration platform. It serves as the foundation for building, deploying, and scaling the wellness and health programs of tomorrow.

The Inform Health IoT platform delivers crucial data from health devices and wearables, making it useful for clinical care and wellness use cases. The most important part is that it is designed to grow with you, being scalable, secure, HIPAA-compliant, and built for developers.

Inform's extensive device library, paired with its simple data model, will accelerate your ability to deliver health solutions, and Inform will help you uncover insights to improve the quality of your users' lives.

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