Following the Spread of APIs in Health: BaseHealth’s Genomic Health Analysis

Because health care has come late to the party, companies in that field have had plenty of time to see the advantages that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) have brought to other areas of computing and commerce. BaseHealth Enterprise, which has been offering comprehensive health assessments based on a patient’s genetic information and other health factors for five years through a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, is now joining the race to APIs. The particular pressures that led to the development of their APIs makes an interesting case study.

Although the concept of an API is somewhat technical and its details call for a bit of programming background, the concept driving API use is simple. We all use web sites and mobile apps to conduct business and interact, but an API allows two applications to talk to each other, serving as a pipe of information transfer. Thus, crucial tasks can be automated and run on a routine basis using an API. BaseHealth modestly suggests in their press release that their API “marks the first time in human history that genomic data is on-call for developers across the globe.”

Example of request for sleep apnea information

Example of request for sleep apnea information

I talked last week to BaseHealth’s CEO Prakash Menon and to Hossein Fakhrai-Rad, founder and Chief Scientific Officer. They offer five basic services, all based on evaluating the genomic and phenomic (observed) data from a patient. A developer can call for such information as:

The patient’s risk for a particular common complex disease, along with risk factors that make it more likely and recommended lifestyle changes The likely effectiveness of a particular drug for a condition, given the patient’s genetic makeup Likely patient responses to various nutrients

Genomic testing is done by companies such as Illumina. Different testing services make very different judgments about the significance of various genes, but there are now evaluation sites (which perform a kind of crowdsourcing to accumulate information validating these judgments) to offer more confidence in the tests. BaseHealth accepts this data along with information about family history, lifestyle, and the patient’s environment to make useful recommendations about handling diabetes, cancer, stroke, gout, sleep apnea, and many other common conditions.

Previously, many health plans and hospitals were interested in the BaseHealth SaaS platform, but did not want to adopt a new application and UI into their existing systems because of the cost of implementation and the time it would take to train healthcare professionals on a new system. The BaseHealth API allows developers at these organizations to use specific features of BaseHealth’s comprehensive health assessment without having to overhaul their existing systems.

Furthermore, large genetic sequencing results are time-consuming and expensive to transmit, and it was wasteful to store them twice (at the provider and at BaseHealth). Some countries also prohibit the transfer of genetic data outside the country’s border for privacy reasons.

BaseHealth’s APIs therefore allow a totally different interaction model. Data can be stored by health care providers and patients, then combined by an application (usually run at the provider’s site) and submitted as a JSON data structure to the API. Only the specific information required by the API needs to be transferred. It is conceivable that apps could be developed for patient use as well. However, because BaseHealth does not offer direct-to-consumer genetic testing, they have none of the problems that 23andMe suffered.

In a field where many vendors scrutinize and limit access to APIs, it’s important to note that BaseHealth’s API is available for all to use–there is no gateway to get through, only a short registration process in which BaseHealth collects a developer’s email address. One can submit 1,000 requests each month for free-making participation easy for small providers-and then pay a small fee for further requests.

APIs hold the promise to streamline health care just as they have reduced information friction in other industries. The BaseHealth experiment illustrates why an API is useful and how it can alter the business of health care.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy Oram
