
Ask HN: API to fetch blood work details? - sharedmocha
Does anyone know of a API that can be used to pull blood work details based on user approval from their blood work companies like(Labcorp,Quest) ?
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iamNumber4
HL7 is the industry standard for medical data.

However you’ll have to write an HL7 interface and then become a HIPAA covered
entity under your physicians or be a covered provider to legally receive
electronic medical records.

Now if your physician has a Patient health record system or sometime referred
to as a patient medical record system PHR/PMR Connected to their electronic
health record EHR/EMR system they can release records to the PHR. In which you
could create an account in and view your results if the provider does that.

Under HIPAA you are entiled to copies of your medical records with some
restrictions, and you can request that from your provider a electronic copy of
your record within 48 hours of the request. all EHR systems that are HIPAA
complient have to provide this feature. However most cases the records are
exclusively sent to a PHR and your account in that system.

Please note you do not own your medical records and things like physicians
notes and impressions do not have to be released to you. Other types of
records not released typically are psychological records or substance abuse
records as that they are mostly subjective observations and impressions style
notes and documents.

Are you looking to enter the EHR/PHR market? If so you’re about 15 years late
and will have tons of competition in and overly saturated market. Now I’m not
saying don’t try, but you’ll have a steep learning curve to climb and tons of
laws and regulations you’ll have comply to. As well as tons of other standards
like loinc, XDS-b, X11, etc... you’ll have to be experts in to even receive
and then decipher the electronic medical records.

Now for the answer to your question; no there are not normally consumer/public
API’s available to access lab results for the average off the street
developer.

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dbg3386
AFAIK, Labcorp and Quest don't provide public facing APIs. EMR vendors do
provide Lab APIs (with user approval): Epic, Allscripts, drChrono, etc. They
use a framework called FHIR. You can go to the EMR vendor websites and find
out how to gain access to these APIs. It's time consuming but not difficult.

