Social Health-App Core (SHAC)

SHAC consists of:

  • a cross-platform smart-phone App framework with configurable User-Interface
  • customizable end-user functionality for various kinds of reminders, social media posting and sharing, application-specific educational content; organizing group activities; data recording, analysis, and sharing of self-testing data with primary care providers; and social support within a first-order social network.
  • cloud-based Backend framework for data storage, social network representation, and user-notification operations
  • a management Web Portal through which administrative, analytical and experimenter functions occur; and
  • a set of robust and extensible RESTful APIs to standardize and support communications among three computational components; and
  • a FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) API that allows data to be retrieved from and entered into an EHR from a SHAC front-end app

The SHAC backend adjusts the App user interface (UI) to the user’s role(s), to expose the functionality appropriate for that role. For social networking, SCAF uses an underlying model of first-order social networks, in which one user role, typically a patient, is the hub or their personal network of other users who support that user in some activity, such as chronic disease self-management or navigation through a cancer care journey. These first-order networks of hub users can be interlinked, with a hub of a network also being a member of a different hub user’s first order network. SHACs social operations occur between first-order network members, and may also be constrained to involve persons or resources within the local Community’s digital boundary or geo-fence. SHAC also explicitly includes the concept of the local community as a geographical container for a common set of users. The community represents a shared locale with common healthcare and physical activity resources for the population within it, and a boundary for the local sharing of information among users.