Commonwealth Fund Releases Study on Making Health Data Useful to Patients Through Open APIs
While more and more doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other providers are using electronic health records (EHRs), patients rarely have access to their digital health data. And patients need more than access.
They need to be able to view and share their data readily and rapidly. Picture a mobile phone app that updates a patient’s doctors and pharmacy whenever a prescription is changed, or that allows test results from a specialist’s office in one city to be shared with a primary care physician back home.
Making digital health data useful to patients is a national priority—and application program interface technologies, or APIs, are needed to realize this goal...