Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Every new protocol introduces complexities—onboarding new tools and SDKs, adapting to new processes, evaluating security and performance implications, ensuring compatibility with existing systems, and overcoming the learning curve. So when a new protocol shows up, the first question to ask is: is it really necessary? Let’s ask that about MCP—what problem is it trying to solve?

Historically, software development clearly separated business and IT roles. Business teams defined the business requirements, while IT teams built digital experiences (e.g., customer-facing applications) based on these requirements. There was a continuous feedback loop where business teams reviewed and provided feedback, and IT teams made necessary changes until the digital experience was public-ready.

The API landscape is evolving rapidly with some protocols rising in popularity while others fade away. The journey that started with SOAP has now evolved into other protocols like REST, GraphQL, gRPC, AsyncAPIs, and more. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), we are now in the era of AI agent/assistant integrations with APIs. LLMs are power utilities. However, they operate without contextual awareness.

As data privacy regulations grow more complex, particularly in the European Union, organizations are under increasing pressure to ensure their data remains within jurisdictional boundaries. Many EU-based businesses, especially those in regulated industries, are legally required to store and process data within the EU to comply with frameworks like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

When building complex, interdependent projects, local testing and debugging often become challenging. This is a common situation for most internal developer platforms and large-scale deployments. Replicating a deployed environment locally is inherently complex, especially when the code depends on external services or specific platform integrations.

The push for digital health innovation and patient-centered care has driven major updates to the ONC Health IT Certification Program. One of the most impactful updates is G10 certification (G10), a requirement that ensures health IT systems offer standardized, secure, and interoperable APIs based on FHIR and SMART on FHIR specifications. G10 is a critical compliance requirement under the 21st Century Cures Act Final Rule, issued by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard designed to overcome the inherent limitations of large language model (LLM)-powered agentic applications. While these agentic applications excel at reasoning, summarizing, and content generation, they are fundamentally disconnected from the real world. They cannot access live data, interact with private systems, or execute tools on behalf of users.