HealthFrame Explorer 2.1.6

I do apologize for my absence, however I have an extraordinary piece of software to show to you today!

HealthFrame Explorer Family Edition is a record keeping software (that with your input,) will keep details and journals of everything you feel is important to retain, for possible future use – including individual detailed health histories of each person in your family; doctor’s visits; pharmaceuticals and a whole lot more, that I’ll try to cover here today.

Developer: Records For Living, Inc.

Supported Languages: English.

System Requirements:

• Windows 2000 or later (Windows XP or Windows Vista preferred)

• 50MB RAM
  (typical memory usage is under 50MB, but could be larger for very large PHRs.)

Additional Requirements:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later (6.0 or later recommended.)
  (See my comments towards the end of this review.)

Tested: Network – 4 computers – Windows XP Pro. I’m unsure why there is a requirement to have MSIE at all, as I’m an avid Firefox user and never use MSIE.

Believe It or Not!

• Almost NO emergency room can retrieve your critical health information;18% of medical errors happen due to inadequate availability of medical information;

• Only 5% of doctors keep patient medical information on a computer;

• If the Center for Disease Control’s annual list of leading causes of death included medical errors, it would show up as number six, ahead of diabetes and pneumonia.

• Medical records are constantly being lost. Your doctor may retire; your hospital or HMO may purge records to save storage space; paper records are lost or unavailable;

• 120,000 Americans die each year as a result of preventative medical errors.

Settings: My advice is to always check your settings/options first, before running new software. Make sure that it will run the way you want it to run, or you could get some nasty surprises in the end – not with HealthFrame Explorer, but definitely with system and registry utilities.

Actually, with this little software ‘gem,’ there’s barely anything to configure. Other than if you want to view toolbars etc. All the information throughout the program is user added and very intuitive.

Once the program is launched, the first thing the user needs to do is to create a Personal Health Record (PHR) for each person in the home. HealthFrame Explorer, also has the following ‘Categories’ that need to have initial input:

Basic Information: Name; DOB; emergency contacts; your insurance and family members – which can be all easily cross referenced within the program.

Calendar: Ability to enter the dates for all kinds of appointments but more importantly, dates for tests or treatment appointments.

Encounters: An elegant term for all kinds of medical visits. These will assist you in keeping track of your visits, both past and present and will log further details of a future visit.

Health: This category is broken down into 3 sub-categories:

• Medications - details of past and current prescriptions;

• Tests – details of type of test and results and who ordered the tests;

• Treatments – type, the length of time prescribed etc.

Journals - This is a very interesting concept to include with HealthFrame Explorer - and having used this program for many months myself now, I can truly see the benefits of its inclusion.

For example: A person might decide to create 3 journals; one each for back pain; migraine and depression. You’re able to see multiple first lines of all three journals on one page and can double click each one to read the full journal entry. If the user were to keep these journals up to date, he/she/doctor might see a pattern emerging between all three, which might be of serious note;

It’s well documented that depression can cause true pain – ranging from mild to excruciating. An entry into the depression journal, may seem to coincide with other journal entries in HealthFrame Explorer, where the user has entered the onset of worsening of migraine or back ache.

Providers: Here you enter all the information you know about your doctors, specialists and insurance. You’ll have a permanent record of their telephone numbers, email addresses and locations etc. No longer will you have to look up these details on appointment cards or in the telephone book. You can also enter what they want you to bring with you to your next appointment – all this information is intuitively and neatly contained within HealthFrame Explorer.

Reports: A very useful feature to have in any health program. These reports can be configured to reflect any kind of information you (or your doctor,) would like to see there at your next appointment. Perhaps he also wants you to keep a log of something particular – symptoms, your daily diet etc., – with the right options selected and use of the journal feature in HealthFrame Explorer (described later,) you’ll be able to give him just that. There are 9 types of reports available in the program, which covers pretty much everything the user or even a new doctor would need to know.

Frustration can be avoided by taking your medical history report (printed right from HealthFrame Explorer,) with you to a new doctor or specialist – it will make it much easier for them when considering your past care and also continuity of care.

Other Features:

• Photographs - of each person can be added to their PHR from your files;

• Password protection - There might be certain medical conditions that the user doesn’t want anyone else in the home to know about;Charts - Another interesting feature, which visually shows the details of any serious conditions you might have, such as: weight issues; cholesterol and blood pressure;

Support for the Continuity of Care Record (CCR) standard;

• Expense Tracking - an incredibly useful aspect of HealthFrame
  Explorer. This feature can track all expenses of your medical care, including out of pocket medical expenses and is easily configurable;

• The Health Frame Library - bundled into HealthFrame Explorer. Search results show several direct links to explore on the web about your condition. Information sources are mostly from the National Library of Medicine, which in itself is an outstanding resource – however, the user is also able to search MedlinePlus;

• Skins - interchangeable by the user;

• iPod – connectivity support; keep important health details with you.

• OpenHealth Services (OHS) plug-ins – extensible plug-in framework;

• Pricing and Care - built in statistics data;

• iPhone - currently being tested and planned for future releases;

• IT Integration - built-in XML-messaging functionality – designed to integrate directly with healthcare providers’ back-end systems;

• Consulting - Records For Living, Inc offers consulting services to help healthcare providers’ IT departments to make healthcare information available to their members, and to allow members to interact with their providers through the HealthFrame Explorer front-end (instead of more costly phone calls etc)

• User controlled data links;

• Forums – Many software users are happy when they know there is a forum they can run to for assistance, if necessary. HealthFrame Explorer offers you that resource. – Also known as ‘Communities’ - I would encourage every user of this program to join. Here you’ll be able to find out about bug fixes (bug fixes?!? I haven’t found any bugs!) - new features planned for future releases; suggestions for new releases by forum members; plus of course you can ask your own questions. There are a few other ways to get support also, depending upon the nature of your issue.

Further Information:

The HealthFrame Lite Edition is FREE. The product is just as good in functionality and design, but lacks some of the amazing concepts of this fully feature rich version. However, it does include the HealthFrame Viewer, which is a read-only program that interacts extremely well with HealthFrame Explorer. These two programs have been designed to truly integrate well.

ONCHIT: On June 2005, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) published four RFPs designed to encourage public and private efforts aimed at harmonizing health IT interoperability standards – and to fund prototypes and demonstrations of alternative approaches to a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN.)

Records For Living has responded to two of the RFPs, proposing designs that meet requirements, while additionally supporting the extension of interoperability services to consumers.

• ONCHIT1 – Standard Harmonization Process for Health Information Technology: We propose a standards harmonization infrastructure that is based on a secure metadata-driven foundation, with support for reporting, auditing, versioning, and rich transformation semantics. Our proposal envisions leveraging mature, industry solutions such as those that have been successfully used in the fields of database and data warehousing management.

• ONCHIT1 – Technical Architecture Proposal – (July 6th, 2005, PDF 0.8MB)

• ONCHIT3 – Prototype for a Nationwide Health Information Network architecture:

• Our proposal specifies a NHIN architecture that encourages innovation, creativity, and technical experimentation by delegating policy-making responsibility to the lowest levels possible. Our architecture supports national standards, with localized control.

• ONCHIT3 - Technical Architecture Proposal – (July 19th, 2005, PDF 1.2MB)
• Contacts

For more information, including how your RHIO, healthcare provider or vendor organization can partner with Records For Living to implement consumer-friendly interoperability solutions, please contact them via email.

Summary:

In my own experience, is an excellent piece of software and very feature rich. The design seems to be flawless, which I’ve almost never encountered before in any software. Most times you can always find a couple bugs, but I haven’t encountered even one bug in my many months of using this program. Performance is definitely consistent.

Price: At $39.95 HealthFrame Explorer is a bargain – and personally, as a long time user, I mean that sincerely. However, don’t forget the Lite version which is also a great price – FREE!

Points:

• Originality: 8/10

• Purpose of Use: 10/10

• Program intuitiveness: 9/10

• Features: 10/10

• Functionality: 9/10

Other Reviews:

• Download.com – Editor’s Review
• Share Up – voted 10

Personal Comments & Recommendation:

The requirement to have IE as my browser, I found to be an irritation, as I have (and prefer) Firefox. With the tens of thousands of people that have now migrated to Firefox, it would have been nice to at least have had the option to use either browser.

My only other negative comment (only 2, pretty darn good Records for Living Inc!) is that in checking their “Find Clinical Trials” report, it links to the NIH where the only reference to clinical trials is “ClinicalTrials.gov.” Searching for a condition called ‘trigeminal neuralgia’ took me to a page where most of the trials were labeled “Now recruiting.” Extremely impressed, I clicked on some of the links, only to find that many were outdated – some as far back as 1997 and 2000. However, I suppose it’s possible that some trials have been continuing for 10 years or more.

However, this is certainly an outstanding piece of software; amazingly intuitive – coded well; not memory intensive and doesn’t chew up your CPU. I have had one occasion on which I contacted their Customer Service – and their turnaround was prompt, helpful and friendly.

HealthFrame Explorer has made it into my list for “Personally Owned and Highly Recommended Software,” in the sidebar.

I hope you’ve found this review worth the read. Please visit the home of HealthFrame Explorer to find out much more than what I’ve been able to cover in this review.

I will continue to bring you in depth reviews on all fronts – in fact, I already have more interesting software ready to review for you.
~ Swan

Records for Living invited to make comment.
Software provided for review by Records for Living Inc.

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