Amateur Hour: Creating Your Own Apps
There was a time in New Mexico when saying you were a BioTrack expert actually meant something. In fact, there are still a handful of people who managed to hold down positions for years largely because they knew which buttons to push, thats all changing now.
To most, the rollout is sudden, shocking, and could be described as chaotic at best. But in the midst of chaos lies opportunity.
Gate Crashers
With the announcement, the CCD has provided API documentation for those interested in developing apps. This, along with access to AI, has swung the gateway for developing your own apps wide open.
The state’s initial API release is focused on retail operations. It supports retrieving sale-ready inventory, pulling delivery drivers and vehicles, validating medical cards, looking up completed transactions, submitting retail dispenses, and voiding transactions. There are some changes to product types, but the package ID now refered to as a “barCode” remains a 16-digit numeric identifier without spaces much like how Dutchie concatenates them.
I myself have minimal coding experience, but with the first volley of API documentation and a few access tokens, I tested that connection using a Google Sheet as the front end and Apps Script as the integration layer. The sheet successfully authenticated against the NMS2S UAT environment, pulled location-specific inventory, returned delivery options, validated a sandbox medical card, created a retail transaction, retrieved that transaction by ticket number, voided it, and then confirmed that the inventory quantity was restored.
“Save Our Ship”
So how much does this cost? Well, if you have a Google Business account, which most of you do, guess what? You already have access to AppSheet, Google’s no-code app-building platform that connects to Google Sheets as the database, or whatever else you use.
Using AppSheet, I’ve been able to build an app where you can pull up a customer, build an order, and create receipts—all workflows that transition very easily to retail. The implications are huge: you could literally build everything you need to run your operation and have it all integrated into Google Workspace, where, let’s be honest, most of your data ends up anyway.
The fact of the matter is, New Mexico operators have spent the last five years complaining about BioTrash.
Well, guess what? You got what you asked for; now’s your chance to build something better.
