Storing very large amounts of data and delivering them to researchers in an efficient, verifiable, and compliant manner, is one of the major challenges faced by health care providers and researchers in the life sciences. The electronic health record (EHR) at a hospital or clinic currently functions as a silo, and although EHRs contain rich and abundant information that could be used to understand, improve, and learn from care as part learning health system access to these data is difficult, and the technical, legal, ethical, and social barriers are significant. If we create a microservice ecosystem where data can be accessed through APIs, these challenges become easier to overcome: a service-driven design decouples data from clients. This decoupling provides flexibility: different users can write in their preferred language and use different clients depending on their needs. APIs can be written for iOS apps, web apps, or an R library, and this flexibility highlights the potential ecosystem-building power of APIs. In this article, we use two case studies to illustrate what it means to participate in and contribute to interconnected ecosystems that powers APIs in a healthcare systems.

中文翻译：

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用于生命科学和医疗保健领域知识转移和生成的应用程序编程接口。

存储大量数据并以高效、可验证和合规的方式将其提供给研究人员，是生命科学领域的医疗保健提供者和研究人员面临的主要挑战之一。医院或诊所的电子健康记录 (EHR) 目前起着孤岛的作用，尽管 EHR 包含丰富的信息，可用于理解、改进和从护理中学习，作为学习的一部分，但卫生系统访问这些数据很困难，技术、法律、道德和社会障碍是巨大的。如果我们创建一个可以通过 API 访问数据的微服务生态系统，这些挑战就变得更容易克服：服务驱动的设计将数据与客户端解耦。这种解耦提供了灵活性：不同的用户可以用他们喜欢的语言编写，并根据他们的需要使用不同的客户端。API 可以为 iOS 应用程序、Web 应用程序或 R 库编写，这种灵活性凸显了 API 潜在的生态系统构建能力。在本文中，我们使用两个案例研究来说明参与为医疗保健系统中的 API 提供支持的互联生态系统并为其做出贡献意味着什么。