The following is a guest article by Troy Bannister, CEO and co-founder of Particle Health.
For many health tech founders, there’s nothing more exciting than working at scale. It’s incredibly rewarding to build a solution that can positively affect thousands (or millions) of people at once. And as we say at Particle Health, you can’t scale over fax!
That’s why launching a healthcare startup begins with connecting to healthcare APIs. While it’s inevitable that you’ll have to build around APIs, there are good reasons to do so sooner rather than later.
“Build vs. Buy” Is An Easy Decision to Make in Healthcare
At first, many early stage health startups struggle with determining whether to build or buy an API.
That tends to end once they’ve asked if a custom onramp to the healthcare ecosystem is important to their core business. API companies tend to focus on a common thread: what costly (yet vital) exercise are healthtech companies re-creating over and over again? The major theory is that organizations that use established APIs will be able to spend more time and resources on building a world class product – not on building and maintaining back-end services.
Take it from me: if your startup is focused on providing care you’ll need to exchange patient data and it’s worth connecting to an API that’s already on the market. Relying on a pre-designed and connected API is a timesaver that will help you move on from difficult problems.
The general advice around “build vs. buy” comes down to whether or not there’s an affordable API on the market that serves your common use case; and if you can implement it without introducing tech debt or security issues. Fortunately, existing health tech APIs deliver on all fronts.
While your startup might be innovative, the idea of treatment is quite common. And health API developers pay special attention to widely accepted standards which ensure that privacy, safety, and ease of use are the default.
Frankly, it’s taken years of effort from immensely capable developers at Particle Health to solve API problems. The widespread availability of plug-and-play healthcare APIs built by others enables your startup to seed its idea in the health tech ecosystem. You can do so at speeds that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
In healthcare, there’s a special obligation to get your product right. Health tech is not about not reinventing the wheel for its own sake. It’s an opportunity to save lives.
Access to Data Informs Your Product
Putting together a healthcare startup means that you’re starting without user data. That kind of information isn’t for sale! Unless you’re working within a larger company, it won’t be readily available either.
This begs the question of how anyone could create an API without data attached. At Particle, for example, our partners resolve this by using our developer sandbox. When live data isn’t available, we can provide synthetic health data for testing purposes.
Once you do start onboarding actual patients, every data point is vital when it comes to building a more effective (and lifesaving) product. A quality API will connect you to as many data sources as possible, ensuring that no encounter is wasted.
This hands-on path to product development is invaluable. Using a popular API is your first step to working with existing providers. It helps you align with their rules, including anti-information blocking regulations, from the start.
The initial data you receive, and the way in which your architecture accommodates it, will help guide your startup to the right product-market fit.
APIs Connect You To Existing Health Tech Networks
It’s also much easier to get noticed by major players when you’re already speaking their language.
When healthcare CIOs consider new products or connections, their default answer tends to be a well-intentioned “no”. It helps to use a solution that already got to “yes”.
Credentialing into health tech ecosystems can be sped up when your API solution is a partner. You’re piggybacking off of the hard-won agreements that others have signed.
With a common API, it’s easier for you to scale. Watch how much faster it is to onboard engineers with documentation and developer knowledge already in place. Modern standards get rave reviews from developers; they benefit from years of evolution.
Using any APIs still involves some work. But FHIR-based APIs make it as easy as it can be to pull patient data.
In stark contrast to the massive growth of health tech, the number of companies who want to upload proprietary data types is shrinking. In fact, if you’re not working with HL7-compatible standards, you might find yourself shut out of relevant data entirely!
Will You Be Part of the Health Tech Conversation?
Several regulations, starting right now, work together to require API use across the health data ecosystem. The Cures Act and its associated policies even require specific technology like FHIR.
This isn’t an overnight trend – we’re talking years of legislative effort here across 3, 4, or 5 Presidential administrations. Interoperability has arrived, and the work is finally paying off.
Once something is established in healthcare, it’s hard to see it changing. EHRs and their associated information architecture are here to stay. The API-enabled network effects of EHR interoperability with SDoH research and consumer apps are enormous. Companies that don’t remove as many barriers to connectivity as possible will be left behind.
Deciding What’s Really Important
If you want to tackle healthcare, you’ll need to be comfortable with contradictions. Health tech startups are mission-driven, but need to evolve into a business. They’re eager to improve care immediately, but have to work around slow-moving behemoths. They struggle to provide personalized care in an efficient way.
We get it. With these challenges, it’s important for your early stage startup to simplify where it can and focus on delivering a new, differentiated value prop.
Particle believes that breaking down data silos enables innovation. Whether you’re a payer, provider, health plan, or a consumer-facing app, API connectivity is a no-brainer when starting out.
Much has been written about the potential of existing healthcare APIs. Honestly, there’s not a great argument for a modern health tech organization to avoid using one. Use them with confidence to unlock your startup’s full potential.
