Ministry to pilot MyMeds app

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

The Ministry of Health is developing and piloting a mobile app called MyMeds, which displays medicines dispensed to a consumer.

Deputy director general data and digital Shayne Hunter says the proof of concept app is being designed to help the Ministry “understand how we can create a secure reusable digital identity that can be used to provide people with access to their health information and engage with digital services”. 

MyMeds will pull information from the national Electronic Prescription Service and show any publicly funded medicines dispensed by a community pharmacy. 

It may also link to NZ Formulary information leaflets for medications.

Hunter says the app is likely to go into a limited beta next month, with access provided to around 50–100 people to provide feedback.

“There are currently no plans to release this application to the public. However, we expect feedback from our users will tell us if we should consider developing a public version,” he says. 

Hunter spoke about MyMeds at the Emerging Tech in Health conference in Christchurch on May 21–22, where he said the pilot is being used to validate the Ministry’s thinking regarding a person having a secure and single identity.

Learnings from the pilot will feedback into the issue of digital identity management, which is being discussed at a government level.

Hunter tells eHealthNews.nz that a further objective of the pilot is to inform what services a national Health Information Platform would need to provide.

“This includes how the Ministry can make its API marketplace flourish,” he says.

“We believe an API marketplace (built using the nHIP services) is the key to ensuring that patients and clinicians can access and share health information across the sector securely and appropriately.”

Other objectives are to validate the Ministry’s ability to iteratively design and build solutions that could be moved to production and testing whether the health system might have information that is valuable to patients.

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