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Has there ever been a time when the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mentioned the term API in a policy speech? CMS administrator Seema Verma told attendees at March's Healthcare Information Management Systems Society 2018 conference, "We need more clinical and payment data being sent to APIs." In a nod to the technology's growing popularity in healthcare, APIs were on the lips of many government officials at the HIMSS event in Las Vegas. Writing code with API help API is a code that allows different applications to communicate. The technology itself isn't particularly glamorous or even specific to the medical community. But so-called open APIs have generated plenty of interest in healthcare because they can be easily shared among developers. In some ways, healthcare APIs boil down to pure computer science, Donald Rucker, M.D., head of the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), said at HIMSS. In other words, a health IT system needs an API to get data from A to B, Rucker said. But in ...