API

In my ongoing review of application programming interfaces (APIs) as a technical solution for offering rich and flexible services in health care, I recently ran into two companies who showed as much enthusiasm for their internal technologies behind the APIs as for the APIs themselves. APIs are no longer a novelty in health services, as they were just five years ago. As the field gets crowded, maintenance and performance take on more critical roles in offering a successful business–so let’s see how Orion Health and Mana Health back up their very different offerings...

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Last month, OpenClinica users throughout Germany converged in Berlin for the very first German OpenClinica Users Group Workshop entitled: OpenClinica – an Open-Source Clinical Data Management System for Clinical and Translational Research.

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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 publicissue), and even everyday conditions such as diabetes, the CDC realized they had to make their content simple to embed in web sites for allthose audiences.

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The approach to FEMA’s first-ever Data Town Hall was refreshing because our OpenFEMA team harked just as much about project management and results as they did about getting creative when using FEMA’s data. The attendees were asked to break into five challenge tracks: GIS, Disaster Assistance Assessment Dashboard, Accessibility, API and Fire Viz; each with a specific project and private sector team lead.

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This is the story of a college class taught inside an open source community. Last fall, I taught Release Engineering to a small group of undergraduates at Olin College, an engineering school a few miles outside Boston. The goal was to teach them how to become functional technical contributors to an open source project--without writing any code. Read More »

The promise of device data pervades the health care field. It’s
intrinsic to patient-centered medical homes, it beckons clinicians who are enamored with hopes for patient engagement, and it causes data analysts in health care to salivate. This promise also drives the data aggregation services offered by Validic and just recently, the Shimmer integration tool from Open mHealth. But according to David Haddad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Open mHealth, devices resist attempts to yield up their data to programmers and automated tools.

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