How Commure Uses Postman to Innovate and Transform Healthcare Software

Andy Rogers

March 3, 2021· 3 mins

With today’s healthcare industry pushed to its limits, there has never been a more pressing time to make modern improvements. Innovation and transformation are key to helping the industry become more agile. Despite medical research and clinical practice quickly evolving to meet patient needs, legacy systems still dominate the healthcare landscape. Ultimately, this can complicate data handoffs between patients, providers, and insurers. Commure, a San Francisco-based healthcare technology startup, is working hard to change this.

The Commure Developer Platform bridges clinical practicality with developer innovation, leveraging Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®) standards and APIs to exchange healthcare data between systems. Commure educates developers on how to address the needs of healthcare clients by providing them with Commure FHIR APIs configured for common clinical scenarios. However, understanding how these scenarios relate to API-based UI and application decisions can be challenging. Enter Postman. Commure chose Postman as their API development and publishing platform to help reduce complexity and lessen the barriers developers face when trying to create advances in healthcare.

“Commure is proud to be one of the first healthcare API developers to join the global Postman community.”
—Daniel Fernando Cubides, Commure software engineer 

The Commure team uses the Postman API Platform to show developers around the world how its APIs work. By publishing Commure APIs on the Postman API Network and creating public documentation that allows users to seamlessly pull Collections into Postman via the Run in Postman button, the Commure team has maximized accessibility of its APIs. In addition, they’re now taking advantage of Postman’s public workspaces, which allow healthcare developers to collaborate directly with the Commure team.

“Commure’s Postman Collections are the perfect introduction to creating modern healthcare applications for a rapidly evolving industry.” —Camilo Espitia, Commure product manager

The following is a snapshot of Commure’s Postman Collections and the clinical scenarios they support:

• Telehealth Visits: Allows developers to learn how the Commure FHIR APIs can be used to build an app for healthcare providers to manage patient telehealth visits. This includes actions such as patient scheduling, encounter notes, prescribing medication, and sending follow-up instructions.

• CareTeam Collaboration: Shows developers how the Commure FHIR APIs can help create applications that allow clinicians to view their patient lists, as well as read, write, and share patient notes with other healthcare providers. Why? Because care teams need customized, efficient, and secure tools in order to collaborate effectively and deliver better patient care.

• Inpatient Medication Workflows: Helps developers learn how to use the Commure FHIR APIs to follow the progress of a simple order for medication to be administered in an inpatient setting. This collection supports inpatient medication workflows—a group of processes and communications designed to provide patients with medication in a safe and timely manner.

• Capturing Data from Forms: Allows developers to learn how the Commure FHIR APIs can be used to build an app to generate and collect survey and questionnaire data required for patient care. This can include forms to obtain required patient information such as health insurance, patient medical histories, and lists of prescriptions.

Now is the time to improve healthcare systems. We have all heard this conversation at a national level. Perhaps we have seen small steps being made: for example, managing healthcare appointments on mobile devices, increasing telehealth services, or digitizing healthcare records. Yet the speed of change is lagging, with large numbers of people feeling the effects during this global pandemic as healthcare data cannot move fast enough between systems, providers, insurers, and so forth. With Postman, Commure is making digital healthcare knowledge, standards, and APIs accessible to developers across the world with the goal of creating new FHIR-native apps that will positively impact the healthcare experiences and outcomes for millions of people.