How APIs can Revolutionize Healthcare

Accessing your medical records is hard as a patient. In their lifetimes, Americans will see at least 19 different doctors, and there's a good chance their medical histories are all in 19 different health record systems so that their data can't be unified. Health Compiler's mission is innovating in such a way that a patient's medical history can be quickly and easily accessed across all the different health record systems and locations in real-time through the use of APIs.

Here are some examples of how APIs can bring incredible changes to the healthcare landscape:

• Transparent Price Quotation: The current system where no one knows how much a medical procedure costs upfront is very inefficient for patients and providers. Patients do not have an idea about the cost of their procedure upfront and what their insurance will cover. Providers are also forced to waste valuable time verifying insurance coverage when they could be caring for the patient. Using APIs, healthcare startups can provide patients with quotes for their procedures before they occur based on their insurance policy and then collect the payments in-advance with a text. Without an API to pull all this information from EHRs, providers would have had to manually source each patient’s procedure and insurance provider. APIs can automate this process and writes back into the health record system when the payment has been collected for the doctor’s records.

• Coordinated Care: Doctors typically coordinate their patient’s care with specialists and refer patients to other providers as required. However, this is a time-consuming process that consists of faxing, emailing or calling information back and forth between different providers and offices, which takes time away from seeing patients. It is also very difficult for patients with serious illnesses to coordinate their care across multiple hospitals and healthcare systems. With APIs, doctors can book referral appointments at the point of care as well as transfer the complete health record of the patient to the referring provider.

• Patients Having Access to their Own Health Records: Patients should have reasonable access to their medical records. But, existing Electronic Health Records systems do not really communicate with each other and even when they do, they are coded so differently that it is impossible for a patient to get a full picture of their health. API-driven solutions can allow patients access to their medical records on a phone app as well as allow the patients themselves to enter their own medical information recorded through wearables or DNA tests.

• Automating Payments: APIs can automate each patient’s communication, payment options, and collection. Patients can pay for healthcare in the same frictionless, 1-click format they use in the consumer world which is a leap forward from mailing checks or logging into patient portals.

• Collecting Data on the Health of the Population: It is necessary to collect information about the health outcomes and patterns across a population to know about the major health issues that may crop up and how to tackle them, clinical trial recruitment, policy making etc. Nowadays, patient data is locked in silos across different health systems. APIs can assist in securely reaching out for patient data from these multiple systems and bringing them into a single data repository.

The above examples are just of the ways that APIs can come in handy to create a a healthcare system that is characterized by a better flow of data between all systems. APIs also provide patients and their providers more information about their health as well as more tools for more effective diagnosis and treatment.