Application Programming Interface or commonly known as APIs are secure door to access your health data in a common data standard called FHIR. The nation’s biggest health insurer, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is opening their data via an API to their (estimated 63 million) Medicare beneficiaries soon. Medicare is our national federal government’s health insurance program for the elderly and CMS will soon will give access to patient data and allow patients to bring applications of their choosing enabling access to their medical data from CMS.

1upHealth is currently a testing partner with CMS and their upcoming Blue Button developer APIs, which uses open data standards and secure data access via APIs. Currently the data is limited to the following types of FHIR® data resources:

• profile: Profile information including name and email.
• patient/Coverage.read: My Medicare and supplemental coverage information.
• patient/ExplanationOfBenefit.read: My Medicare claim information.
• patient/Patient.read: My general patient and demographic information.

After this pilot, CMS will be migrating these functionality and services to production live system and where 1upHealth will be proudly supporting their initiatives from patients/developer angle.