SMART Health IT · Rate Limits

Smarthealthit Rate Limits

SMART Health IT does not publish numeric rate limits for its public sandboxes. The open FHIR servers (r2/r3/r4.smarthealthit.org), the SMART App Launcher, and the reference Bulk Data server are free shared test infrastructure operated for the developer community; capacity is governed by fair use rather than documented per-key quotas, and there are no accounts or API keys to meter against. The Bulk Data server exposes its own pacing controls - the async $export pattern returns 202 with a status URL and clients are expected to honor Retry-After when polling - and its simulated database size, file pagination, and error rates are configurable per test server instance.

Smarthealthit Rate Limits is the machine-readable rate-limit profile for SMART Health IT on the APIs.io network, conforming to the API Commons Rate Limits specification.

It captures 4 rate-limit definitions, measuring requests, launches, and patients.

The profile also includes 3 backoff/retry policies defined and response codes documented for throttled.

Tagged areas include SMART on FHIR, FHIR, Health IT, Sandbox, and Rate Limiting.

4 Limits Throttle: 429
SMART on FHIRFHIRHealth ITSandboxRate LimitingQuotas

Limits

Open FHIR Sandbox Requests anonymous
requests
not published
No documented numeric limit; shared fair-use test infrastructure with no API keys.
SMART App Launcher Sessions anonymous
launches
not published
Launch simulations and OAuth flows are unmetered; no client registration exists to meter against.
Bulk Data Export Polling client
requests
honor Retry-After
The $export status endpoint follows the FHIR async pattern; clients must poll politely and honor Retry-After headers.
Bulk Data Simulated Database server-instance
patients
configurable up to 1,000,000
Each generated Bulk Data test server is configured with a simulated patient population size, resources per file, and optional error simulation.

Policies

Fair Use
The sandboxes are shared community test servers with synthetic data; keep traffic modest and never send real PHI or production load.
Async Polling Etiquette
Bulk Data $export clients should poll the Content-Location status URL with exponential backoff and honor Retry-After on 202 and 429 responses.
Data Resets
Sandbox data is synthetic and may be reset or reloaded at any time; do not depend on writes persisting.

Sources