Healthcare APIs: Top 7 Use Cases & Challenges with Examples

Healthcare APIs can facilitate the healthcare digital transformation and enable new ways for using healthcare data including:

Check out to explore healthcare API use cases and the possible challenges they face in the healthcare industry, with the recommendations for overcoming them. 

7 use cases  & real life examples of healthcare APIs

Healthcare companies can use or create customer-facing application programming interfaces (APIs) to develop web and mobile applications to engage with customers. Additionally, Internal APIs can be developed to streamline and increase efficiency in healthcare companies’ internal operations and interactions with other partners. 

Incorporating these APIs into healthcare applications allows the healthcare industry to connect vast data elements, improve care coordination, reduce unnecessary care costs, and enhance the quality of patient care.

By leveraging cloud healthcare APIs, organizations can ensure effective management of health data, facilitate interoperability between different systems, and create a cohesive healthcare system.

1. Prescription fulfillment API

Prescription fulfillment APIs in healthcare can manage the process of managing, dispensing, and refilling prescriptions to contribute to better medication management.

Healthcare providers and pharmacists can use these APIs to automate prescription submission to ensure quick access to clinical data and patient health records stored in EHR systems. By connecting cloud healthcare APIs, these solutions can facilitate data sharing between healthcare organizations and pharmacies to improve patient outcomes.

Additionally, these APIs support real-time patient inputs and reduce unnecessary care costs by allowing virtual appointments for prescription consultations.

Real-life example

The Walgreens Pharmacy Prescription healthcare API enables users of third-party apps to request prescription refills originally filled at any of Walgreens’ 8,200+ locations.

Users can order refills or transfer prescriptions from other pharmacies to a nearby Walgreens and receive notifications when their prescriptions are ready for pickup.

This healthcare API is designed to enhance prescription compliance and support personal health management by offering automated refill alerts and simplifying the process. Walgreens also aims to improve healthcare adherence by expanding its reach through integration with third-party healthcare apps.¹

2. Diagnostic API

Diagnostic APIs leverage machine learning and large datasets to provide healthcare professionals with actionable guidance based on patient information and clinical data.

These healthcare APIs can analyze patient symptoms, connect with EHR systems, and offer possible diagnoses by utilizing data from public health sources such as the World Health Organization. By facilitating interoperability and enabling the use of data standards such as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), diagnostic APIs also help healthcare providers save time and resources while improving care coordination in inpatient hospitals and acute care settings.

Real-life example

The Infermedica healthcare API is a healthcare tool designed to assist developers in integrating symptom-checking and triage capabilities into their applications. The tool leverages medical reasoning to assess patients’ symptoms and provide suggestions on possible conditions, along with recommendations for the appropriate level of care.

The API is intended to improve decision-making in healthcare settings and empower patients to make more informed decisions regarding their health. Key features of the Infermedica API include:

• Symptom checker: It gathers information about symptoms and other data from patient records to provide a list of possible conditions.
• Triage: Based on symptom inputs, it advises users whether they should seek medical attention urgently or monitor their condition at home.
• Medical data collection: It uses structured, evidence-based knowledge to collect relevant patient data in a precise and standardized way.
• Integration: Developers can easily integrate the API into various healthcare apps, platforms, or systems, providing both patients and healthcare providers with a more seamless health management tool.²

3. Healthcare data storage API

Healthcare data storage APIs play a crucial role in clinical data management and the secure handling of patient records, including clinical documents, medical records, and electronic health records (EHR).

Patient health records are highly sensitive and must comply with data standards such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Leveraging cloud storage solutions, these APIs enable healthcare organizations to securely store and access patient data while ensuring compliance with security standards.

By eliminating data silos and promoting data sharing, healthcare providers can retrieve up-to-date patient information and derive insights to improve patient outcomes.

Real-life example

The AdvancedMD FHIR API is a healthcare API that allows third-party applications to access patient data from electronic health records (EHR) in a secure, read-only format. It facilitates interoperability between healthcare providers, while ensuring that data sharing complies with the Cures Act and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines. The AdvancedMD FHIR API provides:

• Read-only access: Enables healthcare applications to retrieve patient data, such as clinical documents, medication management, and lab test results, while maintaining strict security standards.
• Patient consent: Ensures that protected health information is only shared with authorized third-party applications when patients grant access via AdvancedMD’s Patient Portal.
• FHIR standards: Adheres to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a key framework in APIs in healthcare for facilitating the exchange of clinical data.³

4. Health tracking API

Health tracking APIs integrate with wearable devices, mobile apps, and third-party applications to monitor health data such as activity levels, heart rate, and sleep patterns.

These APIs are essential for healthcare applications that track real-time patient inputs and support patient demographics and treatment plans. By capturing large datasets, health tracking APIs empower healthcare providers to derive insights that aid in preventive care.

Figure 1: Apple’s Atrial fibrillation (AFib) tracking feature.⁴

Real-life example

The Human API Wearable API allows users to connect over 300 wearable devices and fitness apps through a single integration. It enables developers to integrate data from devices like fitness trackers into their apps to monitor health metrics, track real-time activity, and power programs such as employee engagement, health coaching, and fitness challenges.⁵

5. Research API

Research APIs provide access to clinical data, drug data, and research information on fields such as protein sequencing, neuroscience, and toxicology.

These APIs enable healthcare stakeholders, including researchers and healthcare professionals, to retrieve data from trial reports, public health databases, and research papers. By accessing repositories stored in cloud platforms, Research APIs facilitate data sharing and innovation in drug development, allowing users to access health records in XML format or XML files.

Real-life example

UniProt is a comprehensive resource for protein sequence and functional information. It provides users with a central hub for accessing detailed data on proteins, including their sequences, functions, interactions, and structures.

Researchers and scientists can use UniProt for tasks such as annotating proteins, studying their roles in biological processes, and exploring protein-related diseases. The database is regularly updated and integrates information from various sources to support a wide range of life science research.⁶

6. Health information API 

Health information APIs provide healthcare professionals with access to general and specialized information on health data, including symptoms, medications, wellness and lifestyle tips.

These APIs are essential for connecting healthcare professionals to medical documents, social media pages, and review platforms that can offer actionable guidance on care coordination and treatment plans.

Additionally, by linking to databases that cover medicine information such as side effects and interactions, these APIs can contribute to safer medication management.

Real-life example

The NHS Go app provides young people aged between 16-25 with confidential, NHS-approved health and wellbeing information. It features content across nine themes, including mental health, relationships, and general health.

NHS Go app integrates information about medical conditions from the NHS’s Health A to Z section, content from NHS Moodzone, including podcasts, self-help resources, and personal experiences, and lifestyle guidance aimed at young adults from the Live Well section of the NHS website.⁷

7. Analytics API

Analytics APIs in healthcare collect and process clinical data from patient health records and other sources, offering insights that healthcare providers can use to enhance patient outcomes.

These APIs integrate with EHR systems and health analytics solutions to analyze patient demographics, treatment effectiveness, and large datasets for clinical data management. Leveraging machine learning, healthcare organizations can transform raw data into actionable guidance that aids in care coordination.

Analytics APIs also contribute to reducing unnecessary care costs by identifying inefficiencies and optimizing resource allocation.

Real-life example

The Google Cloud Healthcare API is designed to integrate, store, and analyze healthcare data securely and in compliance with regulatory standards including HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Below are the key features of Google Cloud Healthcare API:

• Data analytics: Integration with BigQuery allows for large-scale analytics on healthcare data. This service enables complex querying, population health management, and cost analysis, as well as deriving clinical insights from aggregated data.
• Data interoperability: Supports industry-standard healthcare data formats such as HL7v2, FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), and DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). It also enables data exchange and integration between healthcare systems and applications, to ensure compliance with standards for different types of clinical, imaging, and operational data.
• Secure data management: Healthcare data can be stored in a structured manner and securely managed in line with healthcare industry regulations.
• Data ingestion and transformation: Supports real-time ingestion of healthcare data, allowing applications to connect to existing systems for continuous data updates.
• Integration with Google Cloud Services: Allows integration with other Google Cloud services such as AI and ML services for insights, Cloud Functions, and Dataflow for event-driven processing and automation.
• Data de-identification: Built-in de-identification tools allow for the anonymization of sensitive patient data, to share for research and analytics while protecting privacy.⁸

Check out for more healthcare APIs. 

What are the challenges of using healthcare API?

Security 

Health data is one of the most sensitive types of data because it contains personal information. Thus, it is crucial to have a secure healthcare API to avoid data leakages. In 2021, 64% of healthcare companies suffered ransomware attacks, representing a 94% increase over 2020. Security breaches can devastate organizations’ financial and reputation (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Negative impact of data leakages. 

Recommendation

Test your APIs regularly and rigorously. API security tests can detect deficiencies and bugs at an early stage of development, prevent security incidents, and save costs. 

Real Life Example

A real-life example of the security challenge in healthcare APIs occurred in 2021 with the Scripps Health ransomware attack. Scripps Health, a California-based healthcare provider, faced a devastating ransomware attack that compromised the data of over 147,000 individuals. This incident highlighted the vulnerability of health systems to cyberattacks, as attackers gained access to sensitive personal and health information, such as medical records, patient names, addresses, and health insurance details.

The attack forced the organization to suspend patient portals and revert to manual processes for weeks, leading to significant financial losses, operational disruption, and reputational damage. Moreover, the breach put the organization at risk of penalties under regulations like HIPAA, which requires the protection of electronically protected health information (ePHI). This attack underscores the importance of rigorous API security testing to avoid similar breaches, as recommended in your text. ⁹

Compliance 

Healthcare entities must comply with HIPAA rules in terms of health and medical information. Failure to do so can have severe effects, such as civil and criminal penalties. If an API comes in contact with any form of electronically protected health information (ePHI), it must comply with HIPAA rules. Some ePHIs are:

• Name, birthday, finger or voiceprints,
• Medical record and health plan,
• IP address and Web URL.

Real Life Example

A real-life example of the compliance challenge related to HIPAA occurred in 2017 with Memorial Healthcare System(MHS) in Florida. MHS experienced a significant data breach when the login credentials of employees were improperly used to access over 115,000 patients’ electronically protected health information (ePHI) without proper authorization. The compromised data included sensitive information like names, dates of birth, medical records, and social security numbers.

MHS failed to implement adequate audit controls and monitoring systems to detect the misuse of login credentials, which is a requirement under HIPAA’s Security Rule. As a result of this breach and non-compliance, MHS agreed to a settlement of $5.5 million with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), one of the largest penalties at the time for HIPAA violations. ¹⁰

Recommendation: Invest in compliance by creating checklists, regular audits, and hiring compliance specialists with HIPAA compliance expertise. 

Interoperability 

86% of non-federal hospitals use electronic health records (EHRs).¹¹ EHR allows maintaining a patient’s medical history online safely and conveniently. The capacity to transfer medical records and other health-related data from one provider or system to another is defined as interoperability. Interoperability is essential in healthcare as it:

• Improves care coordination: Healthcare professionals will be able to utilize patients’ important data to provide a better level of care and treatment, as access to data can reduce the number of repeat tests and miscommunication. 
• Higher performance: Organizations can analyze data trends, historical performance, and other factors to improve patient care and other areas thanks to interoperability.
• Better patient experience: Interoperability can reduce the number of bureaucratic works that patients and healthcare professionals face in the healthcare ecosystem. 

However, interoperability can be difficult to achieve as many different EHR providers use different programming languages and vocabularies. In 2021, the national coordinator’s office for health information technology reported that 73% of hospitals surveyed indicated that they had faced challenges in exchanging data from different vendor platforms.¹²

APIs themselves do not solve the interoperability problem. However, regulations and standards have been developed to improve the interpretability of EHR and APIs. All key players in healthcare in the US have to adhere to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and US Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI).

FHIR

FHIR is a standard open-source framework that is developed to ease the challenge of data sharing and interoperability without harming information integrity. 

FHIR specifies exactly how data sharing must be done to ensure that all parties can understand one another. It uses RESTful APIs and allows sharing of documents in XML, JSON, or RDF format.

USDCI

The USCDI specifies which details must be disclosed in response to a patient’s request. This standard expands the common clinical data set (CCDS) data classes. (see Figure 3)

Figure 3: Common clinical data set from The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC).¹³

Recommendation: Cloud service providers that support the FHIR standard can be a cost-effective way to build an interoperable infrastructure on top of an existing system. Some of the cloud service providers that support FHIR are IBM FHIR Server, Azure API for FHIR, and Google Cloud Healthcare API.

Further reading:

• Top 18 AI Use Cases for Healthcare Industry

External Links

• 1. “Pharmacy Prescription API“. Walgreens. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 2. “API for custom solutions“. Infermedica. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 3. “About AdvancedMD FHIR APIs“. AdvancedMD. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 4. “Healthcare – Apple Watch“. Apple. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 5. “Wearable API“. Human API. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 6. “Programmatic access“. UniProt. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 7. “NHS website developer portal“. NHS Go. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 8. “Cloud Healthcare API“. Google Cloud. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 9. FierceHealthCare “Scripps ransomware post-mortem reveals significant ripple effects for nearby hospitals”
• 10. HHS “$5.5 million HIPAA settlement shines light on the importance of audit controls”
• 11. “Quickstats“. HealthIT.gov. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 12. “Use of Certified Health IT and Methods to Enable Interoperability by U.S. Non Federal Acute Care Hospitals, 2019” (PDF). The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. January 2021. Retrieved September 27, 2024
• 13. “U.S. Core Data for Interoperability Task Force
  Draft Recommendations to the HITAC” (PDF). The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. April 2019. Retrieved September 27, 2024