HealthCodes API
Download the files, or don't
You can just download the nomenclature. For a one-off analysis you probably should. Here is where the cost actually lands when it is not one-off.
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curl https://api.healthcodesapi.be/v1/source-status \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"What you get
A ZIP of just over 60 MB holding pipe-delimited text files, plus a spreadsheet describing the column layout. Unpacked that is roughly 1.9 million rows across dozens of tables you have to join yourself.
For a single question — how many codes exist, what does procedure X cost — that is the right tool. An afternoon's work and you have your answer.
The three places it goes wrong
Amounts use a dot as the thousands separator. A naive parse turns €1,694.42 into €1.69, and nobody notices until someone checks an invoice.
The archives carry a 2018 timestamp whatever their contents, so you cannot tell from HTTP whether anything changed — you re-download everything and compare, every time. And the intermediate update files disappear from the site after about five months: miss one and that slice of history is gone for good.
When the API is cheaper
As soon as the answer has to stay current. The cost then is not parsing but maintenance: fetching each publication, detecting differences, absorbing format changes, keeping history. A few days a year, every year, plus the times it breaks inconveniently.
We keep every archive byte for byte with its SHA-256, so any response traces back to the exact file it came from. That is what a download does not give you unless you build it yourself.
HealthCodes API is an independent developer service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by RIZIV/INAMI. Official publications remain authoritative.
Simple pricing that scales with your application.
Every plan includes both languages, full history and change tracking.