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Healthcare organizations seeking to create interoperability between internal apps, EHRs, and other data exchange tools, are increasingly turning
to application programming interfaces (APIs) to manage the flow of information between disparate systems.
As the ongoing transition to value-based care, population health management, and care coordination creates an imperative for actionable
insights at the point of care, APIs can ensure the electronic health record data is accessible to the right internal and external users while
remaining protected from malware and outside threats.
“We’re moving out of the era of EHR implementation and adoption and into the era of interoperability,” Bob Robke, Vice President of
Interoperability at Cerner Corporation told (https://ehrintelligence.com/news/future-of-ehrs-interoperability-population-health-
and-the-cloud) EHRIntelligence.com.
“Now that we’ve automated the health record, the next phase is connecting all of the information in the EHR. We need interoperability and open
platforms to accomplish this.”
For applications that function by pulling a constant stream of data from one or more sources, an API is especially important to decrease
development time, save storage space on endpoint devices, and overcome any differences in the standards or programming languages used to
create the data that lives at either end of the bridge.
For example, third-party travel planning sites like Expedia or Kayak don’t generate data on their own to deliver comparisons of flight prices from
ten or twelve different airlines.
They simply use the API provided by each individual airline to plug into the flight scheduling software for each company and pull information
into a single view for the end-user.
“We’re moving out of the era of EHR implementation and adoption and into the era of
interoperability.”
Because the API is a standardized gateway to the airline’s schedule and pricing data, Expedia or Kayak doesn’t have to develop a dozen different
methodologies tailored to each airline before they can establish communications.
This eliminates the need for the travel comparison site to duplicate every dataset, create new data, or hold the data itself in order to function.
APIs function similarly in enterprise environments, making building applications and accessing data quicker, more efficient, and less prone to
duplication or security errors.
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11/23/2020 Why Application Programming Interfaces Are Key for Healthcare
WHY APIS ARE CRITICAL FOR HEALTH IT DEVELOPMENT
Healthcare organizations face challenges accessing and sharing data, especially as healthcare IT infrastructure migrates
(http://hitinfrastructure.com/news/healthcare-cloud-becomes-it-infrastructure-necessity) to the cloud, and digital information
becomes an industry standard. Different data sets use different formats, making interoperability between apps challenging.
“There’s no such thing as one set of data that gives you everything you need in one single format,” Dr. Nicholas Marko, Chief Data Officer at
Geisinger Health told (http://healthitanalytics.com/features/a-fhir-future-burns-brightly-for-population-health-management)
HealthITAnalytics.com. “There will always be information coming from a number of different places, and there will always be a need to work
with systems that handle that.”
Because APIs are the points of communication between systems, they are being developed to simplify interoperability to provide healthcare
professionals and users data more efficiently.
“There’s no such thing as one set of data that gives you everything you need in one single
format.”
FHIR creates (https://www.hl7.org/fhir/overview.html) a standard to make it easier for healthcare professionals to use and share
clinical data by restructuring healthcare data from different sources into a compatible format for easier interoperability.
“Healthcare records are increasingly becoming digitized,” official FHIR documentation states. “As patients move around the healthcare
ecosystem, their electronic health records must be available, discoverable, and understandable. Further, to support automated clinical decision
support and other machine-based processing, the data must also be structured and standardized.”
The ONC’s proposed rule for 2015 Edition Certified EHR Technology (CEHRT) outlines (https://s3.amazonaws.com/public-
inspection.federalregister.gov/2015-06612.pdf) three technical outcomes for APIs that vendor products need to meet:
Security: The API needs to include a means for the establishment of a trusted connection with the application that requests patient data. This
would need to include a means for the requesting application to register with the data source, be authorized to request data, and log all
interactions between the application and the data source.
Patient selection: The API would need to include a means for the application to query for an ID or other token of a patient’s record in order to
subsequently execute data requests for that record.
Data requests, response scope, and return format: The API would need to support two types of data requests and responses: “by data
category” and “all.” In both cases, while the scope required for certification is limited to the data specified in the Common Clinical Data Set,
additional data is permitted and encouraged.
The ONC 2015 CEHRT regulations encourage developers to custom design APIs that work for their institution while outlining requirements to
ensure security and data integration.
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Organizations are tasked with implementing security measures and protocols to protect their network and data from malicious attacks or leaked
information, both of which could have serious implications for patients.
The Health IT Policy and Standards Committee formed the API Task Force (https://www.healthit.gov/facas/health-it-policy-
committee/hitpc-workgroups/api-task-force) to “identify perceived security concerns and real security risks that are barriers to the
widespread adoption of open APIs in healthcare.”
A report (https://www.healthit.gov/archive/archive_files/HIT%20Joint%20Committee/2016/API%20Task%20Force/2016-
04-26/SingleSourceofTruth-APITFRecommendations.pdf) released earlier this year by the API Task Force, along with the Health IT
Policy and Standards Committee, outlines security concerns APIs bring to healthcare.
"There are fears that APIs may open new security vulnerabilities, with apps accessing patient records 'for evil', and without receiving proper
patient authorization," stated the report. "There are also fears that APIs could provide a possible 'fire hose' of data, as opposed to the 'one sip at a
time' access that a web site or email interface may provide."
Considering how public, consumer-facing APIs function, the concerns raised by the report are valid. There is the risk of users gaining access to
too much data instead of just the data they need.
Even if the user is not “evil,” authorized users accessing a wealth of data they do not need is still a security risk and may violate HIPAA privacy
regulations.
The report found that when properly secured and managed, the benefits of APIs outweigh the risks. Several organizations testified their properly
managed APIs provided better security than legacy or proprietary integration technology.
Well-managed healthcare API exchanges usually include authentication, authorization, encryption, and signatures to ensure secure connections.
If patients do not understand the value their personal health data has to hackers seeking to steal their identity, they are more likely to carelessly
share it with a third party app and expose themselves to privacy breaches.
The Task Force also recognizes the potential risk of patients accessing HIPAA-approved APIs and sharing the information with an app that is not
regulated under HIPAA, such as a commercial fitness tracker app.
The API Task Force recommends that the The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) coordinates a
program to define the basics of privacy literacy and educate patients to understand basic privacy information needs to make appropriate
decisions regarding sharing personal health data with unauthorized apps.
The Regenstrief Institute is one of several organizations seeking to merge patient health data from separate data sources to create an industry
data standard using HL7’s FHIR.
"We can really stitch together information in various sources using FHIR in a way that is user-centered and would be accepted by physicians and
patients," Regenstrief Institute investigator Titus Schleyer, MD, PhD, told (http://healthitinteroperability.com/news/longstanding-it-
challenges-still-limit-potential-of-fhir) HealthITInteorperability.com.
The Regenstrief Institute aims to leverage the FHIR standard and API technology to assemble health information from different EHR systems.
The Institute deployed a use case between between an Epic EHR using the open.epic API and the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) using
a previous version of FHIR.
"We can really stitch together information in various sources using FHIR in a way that is user-
centered."
Although this use-case was not a full implementation, the Regenstrief Institute was able to give INPC proof of concept that their data could be
integrated.
The Argonaut Project is another organization with close ties to FHIR. The group is working to develop
(http://argonautwiki.hl7.org/images/e/ec/Argonaut_UseCasesV1-1.pdf) a FHIR-based API and Core Data Services to expand the
sharing of electronic health information.
The goal of the Argonaut Project is to “enable interested vendors and providers to develop and implement a focused but complete FHIR API
specification, and accompanying security implementation.”
Argonaut members encourage prepared entities to move more quickly towards data standardization and API adoption than current regulatory
processes require in order to lead the industry by example.
“I’ve seen a lot more progress when groups of provider organizations and technology developers get together and say, ‘We're going to go at the
quickest pace we can, regardless of whether the whole market travels at the same speed,’” Arien Malec, Vice President of Data Platform and
Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth told (http://healthitanalytics.com/news/health-data-interoperability-requires-patience-
persistence) HealthITAnalytics.com.
“Clearly, I'm proud of my work in the CommonWell Health Alliance and in being part of the Argonaut Project, which I think are both good
representations of that attitude that says, ‘We're going to get together and drive interoperability independently of the certification program.’”
"We're going to go at the quickest pace we can, regardless of whether the whole market travels at
the same speed."
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11/23/2020 Why Application Programming Interfaces Are Key for Healthcare
The Argonaut Project aims to introduce specifications for a new architectural pattern and style for healthcare organizations to access data and
services, and more flexible and open methods for authorized access to health information.
While these projects have yet to be fully realized, the potential for APIs in health data integration for secure and efficient access is promising.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently called (http://healthitinteroperability.com/news/how-health-it-
standards-enable-patient-access-to-health-data) for the use of APIs to help providers meet requirements for electronic patient access to
health information by giving consumers tools to easily interact with their personal health data.
ONC also recognized the importance of FHIR and APIs by hosting a pair of industry challenges (http://healthitanalytics.com/news/onc-
launches-two-fhir-interoperability-app-challenges) and a funding opportunity to address several interoperability issues in healthcare
including: helping patients access their data, improving the provider user experience of EHRs and other health IT tools, and coordinating the
development of app-based solutions across the industry.
The support CMS and the ONC have for FHIR and APIs speaks to the future of the technology and its potential impact on healthcare
interoperability.
"And vendors who are implementing it are feeling their way forward to make sure they understand it, and to discover if there are any gaps or
bugs, or if the specification is not actually specific enough.”
As API development continues, the importance of creating a standard for healthcare application communication is a priority for vendors and
organizations.
“As an industry, we have to come together to solve the problem of access to our own healthcare information,” said
(http://healthitanalytics.com/features/a-fhir-future-burns-brightly-for-population-health-management) Cerner Corporation
President Zane Burke.
“Patients deserve access to their data no matter where they are in the country, and no matter where their record primarily resides. They should
have the ability to provide consent to have a clinician be able to pull those records whether they’re on a Cerner system or a competitor’s solution.
Ultimately, that’s what we need to deliver.”
As interoperability efforts such as The Argonaut Project and The Regenstrief Institute continue to develop a data standard that can be
implemented universally, across healthcare organizations, APIs will be able to easily request and retrieve data from multiple EHR solutions
across multiple healthcare organizations and arrange them in a clear usable format.
"Patients deserve access to their data no matter where they are in the country, and no matter
where their record primarily resides."
As API development continues, healthcare organizations can prepare their IT infrastructure by implementing app development and cloud
solutions (http://hitinfrastructure.com/news/healthcare-cloud-becoming-critical-it-infrastructure-tool) where necessary and
improving wireless network (http://hitinfrastructure.com/news/increased-cloud-demands-calls-for-health-it-wan-evolution)
speed and capacity to support faster and more efficient data exchange between applications and sources.
Organizations looking to embrace better interoperability - and have the IT infrastructure to support it - may benefit from bringing more
developers onto their IT staff to develop APIs for standardized data to increase organization operations and prepare for a future of shared data.
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