Hello World with Indivo X

Ben Adida the project manager for the Indivo X project has announced the first public code drop of Indivo X on the Indivo developers mailing list, two days ago. Since then I have been spinning up a Rackspace Cloud instance to see if I could get it up and running.

I do not yet have write access to the wiki to make notes, but I documented all of the issues I had using Sidewiki so if you want to use an identical setup, I might save you an hour or so. Frankly, most of the hiccups I have are due to fact that I am most comfortable using PHP/MySQL/RedHat rather than the Ubuntu/Python/PostgreSQL setup used by Indivo X. After clearing some mental cobwebs, I had my own Indivo X PHR Platform installed and running..

Here is the obligatory screenshot, sanitized for spammers…

Of course, there are no applications to install yet, so “get more apps” does nothing. But the basic Indivo X platform is available, and will be going through the standard alpha/beta/1.0 process over the next few weeks/months.

Why this matters

Eventually there will be a dominant health platform upon which most personal health applications will be built. These are the applications that patients will use directly as health consumers.

This is the core enabler for the e-patient, it is at the heart of “Health 2.0”

It is the PHR or Personal Health Record. This health records of the future will be massively connected, like the Internet today, and the same way each of us has a primary email address, where our email records all end up, in the future we will all have Personal Health Records. Just like there is a competition between email providers, there will be a competition between PHR platforms. For many years, you can count on it being pretty difficult to move between these platforms however, alot more like getting a Mac to talk to a PC and vice-versa, than moving your email provider.

The dominant platform might be Google Health, HealthVault, or some kind of layer on the Health Internet (perhaps a spin-off from the Mirth or CONNECT projects)

However, my money is on Indivo X.

Indivo X is the newest PHR Platform engine developed jointly by Harvard Medical School ,  Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and Intelligent Health Lab. Indivo X is a complete reimagining of the original Indivo PHR, which was already one of the most successful Open Source PHR applications available. It was the codebase behind Dossia, which is one of the three “big” PHR deployments (the others are Google Health and HealthVault). Indivo X comes from impeccable stock.

Indivo X is dramatically different the original Indivo project in several important ways. First it is entirely rebuilt using the Python Django + PostgreSQL stack. Second it has been redesigned to be a PHR-platform, PHR functionality in Indivo X will be provided by modular applications, applications that could even be hosted on other computers. Indivo X is designed to create a market for PHR sub-applications using unifying PHR data abstractions provided by Indivo X. The notion for Indivo X is almost entirely based on the notions first outlined in now-famous NEJM article. I had criticized the article because it does not fully consider the implications of the proprietary trap for health software. However, this release renders most of my comments moot. These guys are trying to strike a balance between a stable platform and respecting software freedom and doing a more than decent job of it.

They have invited me to code on their development server, which has been up for a while, but I have very limited time due to my own skunkworks project (love a secret….) , and I can only afford to contribute when I can see both ends of the code. Still my skunksworks application will be consumer facing health application (Open Source eventually… of course) that is suitable to interface with HealthVault, Google Health and of course Indivo X. Given my feelings on software freedom, you can bet which one I plan on integrating with first….

An alpha code drop is a big day for any project and I know that the Indivo team has been working hard on this for months now. Congratulations are in order.

-FT