Healthcare Software

Mapping Continua results to Google Health

Google Health is a website intended for patients to track their health online, including self-monitoring test results. Continua is a certification that proves your self-monitoring device is interoperable. So you would expect a Continua-certified device to interoperate directly with Google Health, right?

Unfortunately, it's not the case - Google Health supports a subset of the CCR standard, whereas Continua uses the new HL7 PHM standard.

But before you start to dwell in despair over the possibility that we'll never have 1 common document standard, there is still hope. When it comes to patient self-care tracking, Google Health really only stores and tracks a small number of fields, and mapping these fields to the PHMR standard is actually very straightforward (in fact, a skilled web developer could develop a .XLS converter in less than a day).

See our Continua to CCR to Google Health mapping below, an extension of the Google API documentation:

Demographics In CCR, demographics are found under /Actors/Actor/Person. In HL7 PHM, we find the equivalent under ClinicalDocument/recordTarget/ patientRole/patient/. The specific subtags mapping to Google Health UI Elements are listed in the table below.

Test Results In CCR, test result tags are found under /Body/Results/Result/Test. In HL7 PHM, we find the equivalent under (brace yourselves) ClinicalDocument/component/structuredbody/component/section/entry/organizer/component/observation. The specific subtags mapping to Google Health UI Elements are listed in the table below.

Vital Signs An HL7 PHM includes either Test Results or Vital Signs. Similarly, vital signs are part of CCR (under /ContinuityOfCareRecord/Body/VitalSigns), but appear not to be mapped to the Google Health UI. According to the documentation: When imported by Google Health, these values are not reconciled. They will available outgoing if the user has [manually] entered these values via the UI.

In the patient monitoring and self-care context, vital signs and test results have a large overlap, so the most logical when mapping a Continua document to Google Health would be to map Vital Sign information to the Test Results UI, in a similar way to the Test Results mapping listed above. Medical Equipment An HL7 PHM document must specify Medical Equipment tags to indicate what the medical device used was (specifying things like manufacturer, model, ID). However, Google Health currently doesn't store or display this information. A possible mapping at this time could be to embed the device name within the Test Result Name field. For example, instead of "Glucose - Blood", build a label such as "Glucose - Blood (LifeSync Glucometer iPhone 1.1)".