This project, sponsored by the MITA Governance Board created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), seeks to develop a cohesive, free, open-source set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for states to use in developing a modern, modular Medicaid system. Like the poplin fabric that is commonly used to create scrubs for clinical staff, it is our hope that the Poplin project serves as the underlying connective fabric for future Medicaid systems.
For more information, please see the Project Poplin web site.
- Enable fine-grain modularity
- Promote reusability
- Promote interoperability
- Promote innovation
- Support migration path
- Establish trust framework for nationwide information exchange
- All data and functionality should be exposed through service-oriented APIs
- Standardize service boundaries (e.g. APIs), not internals
- Focus on data standards and resource definitions
- All service APIs must be designed to be able to expose the interface to the outside world
- Even if that is not the immediate intent
- Hide internal implementation details through APIs
- Keep APIs technology agnostic
- It doesn’t matter what technology is used in the service
- Make services simple for consumers
- Easier to use and replace
- Must be transparent and reusable
- Must use open standards
- Public APIs shall be documented
- Services should strive to be small and do one thing well
- Services should be loosely coupled and have bounded contexts
- New service APIs should be RESTful and stateless
- Migration path and schedule should be provided for legacy SOAP-based interfaces
- Determine contract definition for RESTful data between services
- API response codes must be correct and meaningful
- Strive toward one data standard and set of resource definitions for each type of data
- Leveraging ONC Interoperability Standards Advisory
- Support no more than two
- Smart endpoints and dumb pipes
- Open source with permissible license (e.g. Apache 2.0)