Nice work! I hear about these challenges in collaborating on research all the time. Developing a platform like this is a significant investment for most teams, and for many, the development and maintenance is a distraction from their mission. The company I work for, Domino Data Lab, has a language/ algorithm-agnostic platform that solves for this. We have a trial for teams who want to take a look and offer a free subscription for academic institutions.
I'd love to know as well. There's a lot of great data on doctors in the US at data.cms.gov and data.medicare.gov. Socrata, the company I work for, builds and hosts the APIs so let me know if I can help in any way!
Consider checking out US Dept of Commerce's Census of Governments - it has a lot of information. There's also a big trend of state/local governments opening their budgets and expenditures to the public in new and engaging ways. Some examples:
A web tool that took a CSV or JSON endpoint and ran a few R/Python/whatever scripts to see what the mean/mode/min/max of each column was, if there were any strong linear (or other types) of correlations, etc.
A lot of example datasets can be found on opendata.socrata.com, data.gov, data.atf.gov, data.cityofchicago.org, and more.
Also check out https://data.nasa.gov/data?category=&search=&type=datasets (linked to from open.nasa.gov) which all have consistent APIs -- so you can write code once and re-use it as opposed to having to write a new API wrapper for each disparate data set
Disclosure: I work for the company that helps run data.nasa.gov
rtrivedi - do you have an email I can reach you on? I work for the company that helps Medicare.gov (and a lot of other govt agencies) publish their data online in machine readable formats and I'd love to get feedback from you and understand how you're using the data and potentially make the data publishers aware of this use case as well. You can reach me at [email protected] if you prefer not to post your email publicly.