You're absolutely right! There's a huge need for standardized APIs for interacting with outside systems for this use-case. In your example, your doctor's office.
In practical terms, there may be some minor issues such as incompatible multiple implementations and adoption costs. But that's made much easier to handle by a very small number of expected consumer systems.
As for interactions with end-result partners, well. I've worked with standards designed to represent such highly general cases (xcbl and cxml). They're invariably rife with interoperability problems and other issues arising from overly broad standards. These tend to not get better over time as much as one might hope, as it's not easy to continuously update standards at a reasonable speed across N target types of partners. Keeping up with how usage evolves is never easy.
The best approaches to this that I've seen in use are those that focus on providing a vehicle for arbitrary data for delivery to the app - like HTTP or TCP. Getting more specific is the route to madness. Which, unfortunately, is probably precisely the bit you'd most like standards around.
You're completely right. There's a very real and very important need for standards here. There just might be some issues worth mentioning that might arise from the attempt to create and rely on them.
In practical terms, there may be some minor issues such as incompatible multiple implementations and adoption costs. But that's made much easier to handle by a very small number of expected consumer systems.
As for interactions with end-result partners, well. I've worked with standards designed to represent such highly general cases (xcbl and cxml). They're invariably rife with interoperability problems and other issues arising from overly broad standards. These tend to not get better over time as much as one might hope, as it's not easy to continuously update standards at a reasonable speed across N target types of partners. Keeping up with how usage evolves is never easy.
The best approaches to this that I've seen in use are those that focus on providing a vehicle for arbitrary data for delivery to the app - like HTTP or TCP. Getting more specific is the route to madness. Which, unfortunately, is probably precisely the bit you'd most like standards around.
You're completely right. There's a very real and very important need for standards here. There just might be some issues worth mentioning that might arise from the attempt to create and rely on them.