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by tkiley 3891 days ago
Heh.. you hit the nail on the head here. I've been in health integration for the past five years. By restful nosql whizbang node standards, healthcare is full of really weird old shit, and if you want to interoperate, you have to be ready to party like it's 1999, because a lot of these systems were legacy even then.

It is rather frustrating to see some of the API designs that are finally getting shipped in healthcare now, though. Right now, I'm interfacing with a market leading EMR vendor's web services API. They advertise it as "REST" with a straight face, but it's the lake wobegon of REST APIs, where all of the responses are "HTTP/1.1 201 Created" (even the GETs) and all of the response times are horrible.

Personally, I'm rooting for startups like Redox Engine (https://www.redoxengine.com/) to bring some sanity to this world, because I don't think the EMR vendors are going to do it on their own.
2 comments
bpatrianakos 3891 days ago
They won't do it on their own because there's really no incentive to make this information easily accessible. Healthcare is like Microsoft and Oracle in the 90's. Everyone wants you locked in to their platforms and services. Add to that the fact that you're constantly dealing with incredibly sensitive information on the level of financial data (arguably even more sensitive) and it gets worse. In finance you have PCI compliance to deal with. It's tough but not as crazy as $50k fines for every instance of leaked data with HIPAA.
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webjprgm 3891 days ago
It may not be deliberate attempt to lock customers in, but just the first part of what you said: there is no incentive to make this any easier. It basically works, so hospitals/clinics that need to make a few simple customizations can do so with REST API calls but it isn't easy enough for third-parties to quickly and easily build large applications. There's so much going on in healthcare that it is hard for big vendors to justify cleaning up their web services over doing other things. Especially when the "interoperability" buzz fits in better with supporting FHIR, CommonWell, Healtheway, HL7, etc.
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dreamfactory2 3891 days ago
Not just healthcare, but pretty much any enterprise sector from travel to gov.
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