Open APIs in Healthcare: The Future of Data Integration

Reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and seeking more effective ways to implement new functionality, healthcare enterprises of all kinds recognize the need for alternatives to prevailing industry development and integration practices.

Outside healthcare, the ascendance of data access and integration facilitated by application programming interfaces (APIs) is the culmination of decades of technology evolution and implementation lessons with distributed applications. Conventional development and integration approaches, particularly in healthcare, proved cumbersome and slow in efforts to contribute to understanding or responding to the current health crisis.

Unlocking more value from the data scattered across healthcare communities is - post-COVID-19 - a critical element in clinical and financial renewal. The report describes a general model for understanding the different categories of information exchange products and services (API-based and non-API-based) in the market, identifies the sources where different kinds of health-related data are most likely to be API-accessible, how APIs are already contributing to development and integration efforts across healthcare and estimates the much larger potential of widespread adoption.

Following this are detailed breakdowns of the offerings of a key set of 20 influential vendors that build APIs to provide live healthcare data, usually for transactional purposes. It specifically focuses on the many uses of discrete data elements about single patients or members, as opposed to aggregated data about groups of patients or members.