Frequently Asked Questions
What is GETHealth API?
GETHealth is a unified solution to access health and wellness data from hundreds of wearables (such as Fitbit, Strava), apps and medical devices using just one interface.
Who are you?
We are team of MDs, PhDs, Creatives and Engineers based out of NYC and India, who have been working in healthcare space for over a decade.
Why did you create GETHealth?
Currently the practice of medicine and healthcare is mostly heuristic driven. There exist big gaps in our understanding of human body, diseases and health. We really believe in the upcoming digital health revolution and using that to turn healthcare upside down with data driven medical science.
How can I trust you with our users data?
We have build and maintained systems for top 5 US medical centers and top 6 global pharmaceutical companies. We know a thing or two about security, HIPAA, audit logging, backups and such. Besides, we do not sell data in raw or aggregate form.
What if your data center gets hit by a lightning?
Although the odds of getting hit by a lightning are non zero (its actually 1/1,190,000 incase you are wondering). We maintain multi-zone replication and backups. And if you been through the Internet Apocalypse of April 2011, we also provide GET Health as a hosted/on-premise solution that can sit within the safe confines of your servers.
Does my company qualify for Hacker Plan?
The hacker plan is intended for startups, individual developers or citizen scientists who want to take up things in their own hands. We are giving up to 100 FREE connected users! Our definition of startup is a business entity with less than 10 employees. We will happy to extended the limit if you are experiencing an explosive growth!
How do I pay?
You will be billed monthly on the Hacker Plan. The payments will be made online through credit card. The Enterprise Plan has options to make annual payments and payments can be made via check or credit card.
What is a connected user? How do you count them in monthly billing?
A connected user is defined as a user who has connected one of his/her device to share their data. Note this is different from users created on GetHealth.io API, for example you can potentially link 100 user accounts but if only 5 of them connect a device then connected user count = 5. The monthly connected user counts will be number of maximum cumulative users connected to GetHealth during the given month. Note that if some users disconnect for partial month they will still be counted as a connected user for that month. The billing will kick in from the day the connected users cross the maximum connected user threshold for the given tier.
We’re looking for private cloud solutions that take care of wearable device’s data in the cloud. Do you have servers hosted in Asia and Europe?
Yes. We provide on premise hosting. We also support cloud hosting providers like aws, linode, and digital ocean and use the data centers of any region they support.
Does your services include, integrating with new devices that are not popular?
Yes. Our services are under active development and we add new devices based on popularity and customer requirements.
How are you integrating with new devices that are not popular?
Subject to availability of client APIs and customer requirements.
Do you support getting, posting and updating raw data on FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) based platforms?
Yes we do support posting data on FHIR based systems.
What are the most common EHR (Electronic Health Records) platforms being used on GetHealth right now?
We support FHIR based systems and we also have integration with OpenClinica.
Does Get Health have support for webhooks? – i.e. Whenever there is an update in user data, can Get Health trigger a webhook (So that we can service an update routine from our cloud server). Or does our server have to manually poll the APIs to check for updates.
Currently we don’t support webhooks, but, we are actively working towards it. We provide APIs to call to sync the user data and then you can call any API call to get the updated data.
What EHR/EDC integrations does Get Health Support?
We support FHIR based EHRs.
Do you sign a BAA (Business Associate Agreements) for HIPAA compliancy in your Enterprise plan?
Yes we sign BAA for HIPPA.
The website doesn’t explain how & where the data from multiple user data sources (say, Fitbit, RunKeeper & Google Fit) will be stored. I assume this will be managed within the get health data store.
Data from multiple user data sources is managed and stored by GetHealth internally. Developers can pull data using source filter in the API calls to selectively get data from different sources for a user.
Are these data stored and managed in a HIPAA compliant way?
Yes, all data is stored and managed in a HIPAA compliant way.
Can my client sleep tight without any concerns of audit on implementing the get health API?
Get Health is HIPAA compliant. We do not grant unauthorized access to user data neither allow any auditing on sensitive data.
Are there any formalities that are required to be completed from our end, for example – data sharing agreement etc.?
Yes. While signing up with GetHealth, you will be required to accept GetHealth terms and conditions and abide by GetHealth policies and data sharing agreements.
I am unable to find the complete documentation for REST APIs. For example, while adding user to the account, where do I find the complete parameter list that can be sent in the request body? The sample just shows 2 parameters – UID and Account Access Key.
The API call uses the “Account Access Key” to validate the request. The UID is the developer assigned ID to the user created, which can be later user to fetch a “User Access Key” using the same API call if the user with the UID already exists. No other parameters are supported.
We are unable to find the connect_url and disconnect_url for Apple Healthkit in the /v1/health/user/devices endpoint. Could you guide us on how we can use Apple Health Kit. (We can see Apple Healthkit here – https://gethealth.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/07/GetHealth_Variables_Sources.pdf and in many other places in the reference documentation but not in the devices endpoint).
You can leverage HealthKit by using our custom app (not included in GetHealth plans) which can sync the HealthKit data to GetHealth. Healthkit does not provide any other way to fetch the data. eg. cloud API.
Can we connect to platforms such as Cerner through GetHealth (Cerner supports FHIR) and get data from them?
We can connect to any FHIR supported EHR system. If Cerner supports Cerner we can connect to it.
Is it possible to get access to the enterprise plan for EHR development for 1-5 users to develop and test before paying for a larger plan?
You can test GetHealth by using any free plan.
Should we need to create the new user every time? Is there any function to check user exist or not? If we use same user id in api function then it creates new user every time.
No, you don’t need to. GetHealth will manage it on the backstage for you.
How we can get the device data? Should users need to authenticate the device account every time ?
GetHealth will prompt you with device specific authentication and authorization which are pretty standard and secure. Once you authorize your profile for particular device, you allow GetHealth to access your data (with scopes you choose), although you can disconnect anytime.
Can we get same data format or chart from the device using api?
You will get normalized data across devices, charts you can fire up. We have dev support to walk through some examples.
After authenticating the device for eg. fitbit.com, I did not get any response in callback url ?
Callback URL is specified by you while creating your organizational profile. You can read up on callback URLs for oauth1/2.
OK I’m game. Where do I get my Developer keys?
We recommend paying a visit to restroom and then grab a cup of coffee because you will to be hooked-on for next couple hours.
