Department of Health APIs to Expand Web Content

Andy Oram | EMR & EHR | October 21, 2015

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) appeal mostly to statisticians and researchers whose careers depend on access to data. But these programming tools are also a useful part of a Web that is becoming increasingly supple and sophisticated. I have written a series of articles about the use of APIs to share and run analytics on patient data, but today I’ll cover a cool use of an API developed by the Department of Health and Human Services for disseminating educational material.

The locus for this activity started with the wealth of information created by the Centers for Disease Control for doctors, public health workers, and the general public. Striving to help the public understand vaccinations, West Nile fever, Ebola (when that was a major public issue), and even everyday conditions such as diabetes, the CDC realized they had to make their content simple to embed in web sites for all those audiences.

The CDC also realized that it would be helpful to let outsiders quickly choose content along a number of dimensions. Not only would a particular web site be interested in a particular topic (diabetes, for instance), but they would want to filter the content to offer information to a particular audience in a particular language. One Web page might offer content aimed at doctors in English, while another might offer content for the general public in English and yet another offer content in Spanish. To allow all these distinctions, a RESTful API called from JavaScript allows each Web page to bring in just what is needed. Topics and languages are offered now, and filtering by audience will be supported soon. At some point, the API will even recognize ICD-10 codes and find any content related to those disease conditions.