At the Health Datapalooza 2015 conference in Washington D.C., Karen DeSalvo, MD, national coordinator for health IT, announced a new partnership between HHS and CVS Health to help consumers more easily access information about preventive health services.
In 1997, HHS launched healthfinder.gov, a government website designed to share health information and improve health literacy of consumers. Within that website is myhealthfinder, a tool where consumers can enter information about themselves and receive customized wellness and prevention information.
Now, HHS has developed a free application programming interface to allow any website to integrate the myhealthfinder tool into any website.
Through the new partnership, CVS Health will use the API to integrate myhealthfinder into its MinuteClinic websites.
This move, Dr. DeSalvo wrote in an HHS blog post, will help keep individuals healthy and keep overall healthcare costs down.
"As a physician, I recommend preventive services, such as cholesterol screening, routine vaccinations and wellness counseling, to help keep my patients healthy and catch diseases early when treatment is often more effective and less costly," Dr. DeSalvo wrote.
Dr. DeSalvo also encourages any developers working on personal health management technologies to explore possibilities of integrating myhealthfinder into their platforms, since the API is publicly available.
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