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Comment by taborj | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully some of these aren't re-inventing the wheel. For instance, currently the first one is helping build APIs for getting healthcare data. This is potentially a solved problem; indeed, interoperability is rather a large market in the healthcare world (I speak as someone who does this for a living).

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There's also a problem of trust. I work for a hospital and I'm never going to pull data from an API built by random people yesterday, especially in a crisis situation.

curious where you would start tackling it? what are the right building blocks that can be accessed for devs building solutions? from an outside perspective there is little access to data across the silos. im helping coordinate the project, not a healthcare expert myself (rather coming from the api / data side from other verticals), so happy about your thoughts.

FHIR APIs are allowing a standards-based approach to accessing healthcare data from external sources, such as an app. In addition, there are national networks for sharing data between clinics and hospitals, like CareQuality and Commonwell. I'm most familiar with CareQuality, as that's the system my company's EHR software integrates with. It uses SOAP calls to exchange CDA documents.

If it's a solved problem, is it easy to link to the solution here?

The solution depends on the problem. The standardizing body is HL7.org, but there are multiple standards depending on what you're trying to do. Currently, the market is focused on FHIR API, which is a RESTful API.

I'm on mobile, but that should give you enough to search for.

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