Health Standards is the umbrella term for the specifications that govern how clinical and administrative healthcare data is structured, exchanged, and secured between systems, spanning messaging and interoperability standards like HL7 v2 and FHIR, terminologies, and regulatory regimes like HIPAA.
Health Standards
Health Standards is the umbrella I use for the whole family of specifications that decide how clinical and administrative healthcare data gets structured, moved, and protected as it travels between systems. It is less a single artifact and more a stack — messaging and interoperability formats, clinical terminologies, and the regulatory regimes that sit on top of them — and no serious healthcare API operates outside of it.
- Interoperability specs - Standards like HL7 v2 and FHIR define the shape of the messages and resources hospitals and payers exchange.
- Clinical terminologies - Code systems such as SNOMED CT, LOINC, and ICD give shared meaning to diagnoses, observations, and procedures.
- Regulatory regimes - Rules like HIPAA govern how protected health information may be accessed, transmitted, and audited.
- National programs - Efforts like the ONC certification criteria and CMS Blue Button push standardized APIs into production across the U.S. health system.
In practice, health standards are what let a patient-access API, an EHR integration, or a payer data exchange work at all — they are the contract that a provider, a payer, and a third-party app all agree to speak. When I score healthcare APIs, adherence to these standards is the difference between an API that can actually participate in care coordination and one that is a proprietary island, and increasingly it is what determines whether an agent can safely read or write clinical data on a patient’s behalf.
Referenced on the API Evangelist blog
Where this standard shows up across sixteen years of my writing at apievangelist.com — how it fits into API design, governance, and the agentic turn.
