Healthcare Industry Is Rapidly Adopting DreamFactory

Medical institutions are adopting DreamFactory for a wide variety of innovative purposes. This white paper uses some recent customer examples to show how hospitals, clinics, doctors, nurses, patients, and insurance providers are using the DreamFactory REST API service platform.

Why Do Medical Institutions Need REST APIs?

Medical institutions need to modernize IT infrastructure, make services and data more transparent, provide self-­‐service options for patients, and develop mobile applications. In some cases, they are developing API services for internal use. This can help with administration, infrastructure, scheduling, billing, prescriptions, insurance, and many other needs. In other cases, medical institutions need mobile applications for doctors, nurses, or patients. They need a low cost and flexible way to provide these backend services.
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But building REST APIs by hand is expensive and time consuming. There is no guarantee that the results will be reliable, scalable, or secure. For all of these reasons, the DreamFactory REST API platform is an excellent choice. DreamFactory makes it very easy to safely expose a database or services as a REST API for patient information, partner integration or mobile development. The platform is highly scalable, extremely reliable, and the security has been tested by hundreds of thousands of developers.

Patient Kiosks For Medical Research Group

A medical research group provides walk-­‐in telemedicine kiosks for patients. These kiosks are specifically designed to allow consumers to have private medical consultations with physicians and allow patients to talk to doctors and nurses about minor issues without an appointment or long wait. As part of the infrastructure behind the kiosk, they chose DreamFactory to expose a variety of databases as a REST API service. The data sources include Microsoft SQL server, DB2, MySQL, Oracle, and MongoDB. Active Directory authentication helps secure and connect thousands of kiosks with important healthcare information.

Nation Provides Patient Information

A European government’s national healthcare program needed to provide medical information directly to patients with websites and mobile applications. A software development partner decided to implement the backend of this system with DreamFactory. Most of the medical information is stored on SQL Server. The system manages users and has role-­‐based access control for security.

Process Claims For Insurance Company

A large independent insurance agency that provides products and services to individuals and businesses decided to modernize their infrastructure with the DreamFactory platform. This capability allows partners, doctors, and hospitals to submit insurance claims and to monitor their status through REST API services. The backend databases required for this project includedDB2, SQL Server, MySQL, and DocumentDB. The system is cloud based with the DreamFactory platform running on Microsoft Azure.

API For Medical Photographs And Videos

A medical information company decided that they needed a REST API for clinics to send large documents like MRI photographs and medical videos along with related patient information. This capability enables over 20,000 clinics around the world to send information with RESTful services, not just through FTP. DreamFactory was used for the REST API, other parts of the backend system included Cassandra DB, DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and Informatica.

Medical Device Company Shares Information

A medical device and technology company decided to adopt DreamFactory as the foundation of their microservices architecture. This allows them to share information in an automated way with partners and internal users. They used the DreamFactory platform to hook up a variety of databases, including IBM DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle. The REST API services that DreamFactory generates are then connected to the Apigee API Management solution. The company monitors usage and exposes the API services to partners.

Regulatory Requirements

REST APIs for the medical industry are increasingly being required by government regulations, especially for Medicare and Medicaid. API services will play a key role enabling interoperability and providing patient information. Here is a quote from Healthcare IT News in their article APIs will Revolutionize Healthcare: “Data access has become a regulatory requirement. Beginning Jan. 1, 2018, as part of the Stage 3 meaningful use program set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, all healthcare providers will be required to give consumers direct connectivity to their healthcare data using application programming interfaces." You can read more about requirements for API services at The Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services website.

In Conclusion

This white paper has detailed some of the innovative ways that hospitals, doctors, nurses, patients, and other actors in the medical industry are using DreamFactory. If you work for in the medical industry please give the DreamFactory REST API platform a test drive. If you run into any issues don’t hesitate to contact support or ask a question on the forum.