Research · Health & Medical Data

Health & Medical Data Research

API Automations' medical research track: reproducible analyses of public federal health data, from adverse-event surveillance to regulatory dockets, published with the code, the data and the disclosures alongside.

A separate track from our civic-data work. Different data, different venues, different review. Research by Kurt E. Sather; resources committed by API Automations for research purposes.

What this track does

Federal health agencies publish an enormous amount of data that almost nobody analyzes at the moment it would matter: adverse-event reports, device clearances and recalls, registered trials and their results, utilization and payment records, and the public comments that shape the guidance those agencies issue. This track takes a question a clinician actually has, builds a reproducible, dated extract of the public data that bears on it, and puts the answer where it can change something: a regulatory docket first, then the peer-reviewed literature.

Every project runs the same way. A governing technical workbook is written and versioned before any data are pulled. Inputs are named with their source, endpoint and access date. The analysis window is the newest period every input shares. A missing input withholds a figure rather than defaulting. Every table is recomputed from a dated snapshot, never appended to. Code, the coding schema, the audit sample and the derived tables are released with the work.

What we publish here, and when

This site is not a journal and does not try to be one. For each project it carries the design and the methods as soon as they exist, the regulatory comment once it is a public record, the preprint as a link to its DOI, and the dataset and code with the preprint. Results beyond what the public comment states appear here only after the journal article is published, and then as a link to the version of record. Every submission discloses the comment, the preprint and this page.

Provenance and ethics

Every input is public federal data. No individual-level record is used or produced; cohort tables carry report keys and coded fields only. An ethics determination for each project is obtained from a body qualified to make it rather than assumed. The commercial structure behind the work, any industry payments to the authors, and any use of AI-assisted classification are disclosed in every output.

Clinical collaborators

Each project has a practicing clinician as clinical lead and co-author under ICMJE criteria, with a stated time budget, adjudication of coding disagreements recorded as part of the methods, and an Open Payments self-check before submission. Clinicians, departments and societies who want to co-author, co-sign or serve as review board of record can reach the team at contact@apiautomations.com.

Projects

What the track is working on.

Each project says only what has happened so far.

Health & Medical Data · Regulatory comment · In preparation 2026

Robotic Surgical Devices: Evidence for the FDA Draft Guidance

A clinician-data public comment on FDA's first draft guidance for robotically-assisted surgical devices, grounded in a reproducible extract of federal adverse-event, clearance, docket, trial and utilization data for gynecologic procedures. Research by Kurt E. Sather, API Automations.

FDAadverse-event datagynecologic surgery