It’s heavy tech time at THCB. Health 2.0 is running a developer conference called Health:Refactored on May 13-4, and a big topic there will be the opening of APIs from Microsoft, Intel, Walgreens, NY Health Information Network, MedHelp, Nuance and more. What’s an API, why does it matter for health care? Funny you should ask but Andy Oram from O’Reilly Radar wrote an article for THCB all about it!–Matthew Holt
As the health care field inches toward adoption of the computer technologies that have streamlined other industries and made them more responsive to users, it has sought ways to digitize data and make it easier to consume. I recently talked to two organizations with different approaches to sharing data: the SMART platform and the Apigee corporation. Both focus on programming APIs and thus converge on a similar vision off health care’s future. But they respond to that vision in their own ways. Differences include:
- SMART is an open source project run by a medical school and is partially government-funded; Apigee is a private company.
- SMART tries to establish a standard; Apigee accepts whatever APIs its customers are using and bridges between them.
