Healthwise Uses Postman Pro to Share Collections with the Team and Company
Healthwise creates health education and applications to improve the quality of health care by making it easier to get patients the information they need to better manage their health. In this manner, they are able to create better consumer experiences and health outcomes.
Located in Boise, Idaho, Healthwise is dedicated to providing health content and technology to help people make better health decisions and manage their health. As part of that mission, Healthwise uses a suite of REST APIs to give clients access to health content and the ability to deliver and prescribe that content to their patients and other health consumers.
The Healthwise API team originally began using Postman as a collaborative tool for providing API collections to internal customers. Over the past year, that thinking has expanded to providing API documentation and a tool to easily create acceptance tests against the APIs as well.
Collaborative collections for APIs
Postman Pro has allowed the Healthwise Developer Solutions team to unify Postman collections into one “single source of truth”, which can then be shared with other groups throughout the company. The team uses these collections along with Postman environments that store the configurations for local, integration, test, and production server environments.
Part of the development workflow is to update the shared collections, which ensures internal customers are up to date with the latest changes. After that, these collections will inform new collections that can be used by external customers, speeding up integration with Healthwise APIs.
Being able to easily share these collections helps the team and others in the company learn the APIs.
It’s easy for them to use the collection, hit a couple endpoints, and understand what’s happening.
Ben Martin, API Development Manager
Generating API documentation
Healthwise generates API documentation using Postman. They export the Postman collection and then convert it to their preferred OpenAPI format. This process allows the team flexibility to utilize any API portal that accepts OpenAPI.
“Since we are already maintaining Postman collections, it is a no-brainer to utilize the same collections to generate fully formed API documentation,” says Ben.
The ability to generate API documentation at the same time as the Postman collection greatly speeds up development and ensures the documentation is accurate.
Testing APIs with Postman
As a next step, Healthwise will explore using the Postman collections to create acceptance tests for endpoints. Since the team already uses Postman on a daily basis, augmenting existing Postman collections to provide testing simplifies the number of steps developers have to complete. This will also lend validity to the API documentation by testing against the same collections used to generate the API documentation.
What do you think about this topic? Tell us in a comment below.