Standardized APIs Could Finally Make It Easy to Exchange Health Records

A federal law requires that health information be easy to exchange by the end of this year. The development of standardized application programming interfaces, or APIs, will go a long way toward making that possible. Trying to access personal medical information has been an intermittent annoyance for most people in the United States until Covid-19 came along with a reminder of what a mess it can be.

Health information on any particular person is usually scattered across multiple hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. Large chunks of most people’s medical histories are lost to any useful purpose when they move or change doctors because getting their information transferred is too complicated.

Health care providers face these same hassles. Even when they use the same electronic health record software, health systems cannot always easily share information, and trying to corral a vaccination record from Walgreens or an emergency room report from out of state is, while sometimes feasible, always challenging.

It’s difficult to overstate their potential not only to allow everyone full, complete, and easy access to their personal health information but also to unlock countless new ways to use that information — as long as the entities that generate the information are prepared to take advantage of this advance in technology.