The transformation role of APIs in healthcare

By- Abhinav Asthana

The healthcare sector in India is growing at an impressive rate, and it shows no signs of slowing down in 2020. As the industry seeks to offer patient-centric healthcare, its key growth drivers—including affordable insurance, telemedicine, remote diagnostics, and medical tourism—are often accelerated by digital transformation (DX) technologies. These technologies include cloud computing, IoT, artificial intelligence, mobility, and analytics, to name a few. What sustains exceptional functioning of DX is the seamless integration of the IT systems and databases of multiple service providers that lies underneath.

This integration, in turn, is enabled by application programming interface (API) technology. The basic function of every API is to help two or more software systems to communicate with each other. With DX emerging as the driving force behind the day-to-day operations of nearly every healthcare industry participant, APIs have become critical in this sector. For instance, health insurers connecting to the Aadhaar database to verify patient identity, using net-banking for fund transfers, or displaying simple weather updates on mobile involve the play of APIs at the backend. Powered by APIs, healthcare service providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance carriers can deliver innovative services and products to patients and partners.

Healthcare and APIs: A growth story

Indian healthcare organizations began seriously adopting APIs during the past few years, and the growth has been rapid. There are presently more than 150 healthcare APIs in ProgrammableWeb's API directory, with more on the way.

Multiple healthcare service providers and health insurers have introduced mobile apps to help patients get access to various products and services. Some insurance companies even use IoT based insights about patient health to define the insurance premia, rewarding individuals with good health habits with lower premia. All of these activities are API-based.

There are many more examples of API adoption in healthcare. In 2018, 15 insurance companies in India came together to build a Blockchain network. The participants planned to use this network to share anonymised health data of individuals in order to minimise the costs incurred by them on medical tests before the issuance of term policies. Similarly, various healthcare apps such as Credihealth, EasyBuyHealth, Portea, Practo, and Zoctr bring patients and health service providers onto a single platform. Nearly all drug suppliers have their systems integrated with online and app-based medical marketplaces for wider market coverage. Again, all of these healthcare initiatives are made possible by APIs.

API development challenges

It’s clear that APIs can bring great opportunity in the healthcare sector; however, the development of healthcare APIs can be challenging for developers. For example, building patient-centric APIs may require connecting with EHR/EMR systems as well as collecting updated patient data on an ongoing basis. The development of APIs in healthcare must factor in aspects such as data privacy protection, access provisioning and control, data integration, connecting with edge systems, and more.

The API development projects in healthcare may also be burdened by considerations such as tight budgets, ROI expectations, business priorities, defining API hierarchy and ownership, monitoring, hiring, documentation, selecting the right technology tools, and selecting the right project control model (centralised, decentralised, or hybrid). Given this range of challenges, an established API development environment platform can prove immensely useful.

Popular healthcare APIs

Today, several popular healthcare-specific APIs are helping organizations achieve their objectives. Being industry-focused, many of these APIs include built-in industry best practices. This means that, for example, users of these APIs may not have to worry about compliance issues because their developers have already factored in those aspects while developing the API. Let’s look at a few of these popular healthcare APIs.

• DrChrono API: DrChrono is a free healthcare API and SDK for developers. With DrChrono, organisations can build APIs using any HTTP client and in any programming language. Providing developers with direct support and access to an active developer forum, DrChrono boasts of 32 million API calls per month.

• Google Cloud Healthcare API: Google's Cloud Healthcare API is designed to bridge the gap between healthcare systems and applications built on Google Cloud. By supporting standards-based data formats and protocols of existing healthcare technologies, this API connects an organisation's data to Google Cloud's features such as streaming data processing with Cloud Dataflow, scalable analytics with BigQuery, and machine learning with AI Platform.

• Human API: A consumer-centric health data network, Human API is designed to connect, normalize, and structure data from over 20,000 unique integrations spanning more than 250 wearable devices and 600,000 individual medical providers in the US. An easy way for consumers to connect and share health data with any company, Human API's network today covers 85 percent of all hospitals in the USA.

• Infermedica API: Infermedica provides an API for patient triage and preliminary medical diagnosis that can help health service providers implement an intelligent symptom checker or an adaptive patient intake form for their health applications. When health service providers send in a patient’s health data—including symptoms, risk factors, test results, or demographics—Infermedica's AI inference engine analyzes it, providing the health service provider with a list of likely conditions and relevant observations to verify.

• Microsoft Azure API for FHIR: Microsoft Azure API for FHIR allows for rapid data exchange in the HL7 FHIR standard format with a single, simplified data management solution for protected health information. Bringing together health data from disparate systems, Azure API’s extensible data model comes with standardised semantics and data exchange. This ensures disparate systems using FHIR can work together securely.

The author is CEO & Co-founder at Postman.
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