There are many reasons why any company that provides services or APIs to the healthcare sector should use a Marketplace platform. But this issue would take several hours and you do not have enough time to do so. Therefore, in this article we will highlight the 5 key factors why you should use an API Marketplace platform in healthcare.

First, let’s set the starting-point. Your case is most likely one of the following:

1. You develop healthcare software. You clearly see the potential of your solution and/or the medical information it deals with, if it could be easily distributed and integrated into the healthcare software and/or Apps we use in healthcare
2. You offer IT services to the healthcare sector. You are considering taking advantage of the API Economy to open them up to third parties thus exploiting the value they have.
3. You offer APIs directly to the healthcare sector. But you are doing it “the old way”, that is, door to door, based on calls, networking, meetings, visits, events, more calls, and more meetings, etc. Time, in the end.
4. You already have your Healthcare APIs on some Marketplace platform for APIs. So you may be asking yourself, “Why am I reading this article?” keep reading, because it may interest you too.

Whichever your case may be, of all the advantages of using an API Marketplace platform in Healthcare, we would like to highlight the following 5 key factors:

Visibility for your APIs for Health

What’s the point in having an API if it’s hard to find? The reason any healthcare API exists is that it can be integrated into healthcare software, or into healthcare apps. And the more, the better.

To do so, we must make it easy for developers to find our API.

Having a healthcare API in a marketplace with thousands of APIs of all kinds doesn’t really help a healthcare software developer locate your API, even if it’s in the relevant category.

It would be much more effective to publish your Healthcare API in a Healthcare Marketplace, because developers and manufacturers of healthcare software will, of course, look for APIs mainly in a Healthcare Marketplace. There will be more and a variety of APIs that may be of interest to them.

And if that Marketplace platform for healthcare APIs actively promotes your APIs, that’s even better, don’t you think?

Cost saving for your API for Health

Nowadays the best way to expose your Healthcare services and APIs to third parties is through an API Management platform. But these platforms have high costs:

• Infrastructure: servers, databases, high availability, monitoring,…
• Platform: licenses, installation, configuration,…
• Support and maintenance: precise configuration, updates, incidents,…
• Administration: configuration management, permissions, roles, users,…
• Personnel: specialized profiles, training,…

On the other hand, using a Healthcare API Marketplace, which is basically a Cloud API Management platform adapted as a Marketplace, all those costs simply disappear: you will be saving on all these costs.

Scalability for your API for Health

Scaling up your Healthcare service or API is one of your key objectives. The scalability of an API is essential to maximize the value your asset brings to the healthcare ecosystem.

Publishing your Healthcare API in a Healthcare API Marketplace has a domino effect that multiplies your market in geometric progression, and generates important revenue for you.

For every API you publish, you will have several subscribers willing to include your API in their software products.

Each subscriber can integrate your API into different products: EMR, EHR, software for Pharmacies, Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Laboratory Information Systems (LIS), Insurers, Apps for all kinds of devices, etc.

Each one of these software products will have a certain market of users that will drive traffic to your API with the daily usage of their software. And all that traffic, if you have your API published in a Healthcare Marketplace, becomes revenue.

Security for your API for Health

“Open my service or API to third parties? So that anyone can use them in their software products? That’s a security breach in every respect.”

This could be the first thought that arises when considering the possibility of embracing the API Economy as a business strategy.

However, API Management platforms obviously have the issue of Security as a key aspect that must be guaranteed.

To begin with, the OAuth2 protocol allows you to guarantee that your APIs will only be used by authorized systems and users. You would have to implement this feature yourself if you don’t use this type of platform to publish your APIs.

But in addition, there are other security aspects to consider. For example, the traffic your Healthcare APIs receive.

Opening up your APIs to third parties is like opening them up to the world. It exposes your backend to a much higher volume of calls than you might have taken into account when designing your systems.

This is why it is very important to be able to establish throttling policies, which are traffic limitations per unit of time that you can establish at different points of the transaction between the consumer of your API and your backend.

Publishing your healthcare API in a Marketplace platform provides you with all these features, which add more security to your system.

Monetization of your API for Health

We have saved for last which is probably the main motivation of incorporating to your business strategy the API Economy: monetizing your Healthcare services and APIs.

By publishing your API on a Healthcare API Marketplace platform, you have the ability to monetize it with enormous flexibility.

Your FREE, FREEMIUM or PAID API for Health

You can publish your API in FREE mode, which although may seem a contradiction in itself can be used as a tactic to attract the attention of developers to your brand and obtain subscribers in other paid APIs.

You can publish your healthcare API in FREEMIUM mode, perhaps the most widespread approach to monetizing APIs. It consists of offering a very limited consumption subscription plan at no cost, and other growing consumption subscription plans at different rates.

This way your subscribers can use the free subscription plan to test your API, to test-drive it. They can then move on to a higher consumption subscription plan to extend the use of their solution to more users.

And you can also publish your healthcare API in PAID mode, in which all the consumption subscription plans you publish in your API have a fee.

And furthermore, in all cases, you can define rates per call, rates per consumption tiers, special rates for out of tier calls, etc, etc., etc.

This will make your API much more attractive to the healthcare software development community, because not all software products will use your API in the same way. Offering subscriber alternatives to your API will increase the chances of getting subscribers, in other words, revenue.

Therefore, in conclusion, publishing your healthcare APIs on a Healthcare API Marketplace platform, such as Nubentos, is a much more attractive idea to multiply your revenue and reach more markets.

Paraphrasing the old Java slogan (“write once, run everywhere”), thanks to the API Economy and the use of a Marketplace platform for healthcare APIs we could say: “publish once, integrate it everywhere“.

By the way, I forgot a detail: publishing your healthcare APIs in Nubentos is free.