561: Engineering Data APIs

In this episode, Ribbon Health CTO Nate Fox joins us to discuss the ins and outs of APIs. Tune in to hear him share how he and his team build out APIs from scratch; how they ensure the uptime and reliability of APIs and how they leverage machine learning to improve the quality of healthcare delivery and maximize their social impact.

In this episode you will learn:
• What are APIs? [13:20]
• How Ribbon Health’s data API leverages ML models to improve the quality of healthcare delivery [16:08]
• How to design a data API from scratch [20:00]
• How to ensure the uptime and reliability of APIs [25:28]
• How Ribbon uses knowledge graphs, manually labeled data samples, and an XGBoost model with hundreds of inputs to assign a confidence score [27:14]
• Nate’s favorite tool for easily scaling up the impact of data science [37:40]
• What is Nate’s day-to-day like? [34:34]
• The qualities Nate looks for when hiring data scientists [39:50]
• How scientists and engineers can make a big social impact in health technology [42:50]

Additional materials: www.superdatascience.com/561