Prioritizing the use of publicly accessible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), it enhances data sharing and integration with electronic health records (EHRs) and other tools used by OPTN members and patients.
Industry-standard APIs are essential for system-wide innovation. Having open and accessible APIs deliver interoperability and enhanced data sharing that is built into the solution. In a platform that fully integrates with EHRs and lab systems, exposing data through a framework would enable decoupling APIs from internal implementation and allow for backward compatibility of all message formats. These capabilities are essential for large, complex, heterogeneous integration scenarios like those of HRSA/OPTN, with disparate entities and stakeholders. This is especially critical as the integration landscape evolves and new organizations, technologies, and services emerge while legacy on-premises systems still exist. With this model, customers are not locked into any proprietary APIs, and can instead manage them independently if desired.
A tool that features a self-service portal for users to access an automatically generated API catalog, documents, and code samples would allow developers to log into the portal, manage access keys, view reports, and call APIs with zero coding. Also, by featuring an administrative interface where data exchange can be implemented, administrators would be able to define or import schemas, set up policies, manage consumers, and shape API behavior including scaling with response caching. This solution offers a scalable gateway for securing, publishing, and analyzing APIs and microservices to both internal and external consumers. The gateway endpoint would accept and route API calls to back-end systems in the cloud or on-prem, verify keys, enforces consumption quotas, and transforms APIs with no coding.