Ministry focuses on integration

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The Ministry of Health is looking to develop its integration capabilities in order to “improve access to and sharing of patient and clinical information to support improved health outcomes for New Zealanders”.

The Ministry has released a request for information for an integration tool and/or services, partner(s) and interoperability services.

Supporting documents say the Ministry is a central point of aggregation for health information about individuals and healthcare provision, and supports integration via its Health Integration Platform.

“As a result, many consumers, communities, sector participants, external organisations and partners need to access the information held by the Ministry,” the documents say.

This demand for integration will only increase as expectations increase from consumers, clinicians and the sector that the information required to deliver care is available when and where it is needed.

The Ministry needs to “accelerate its delivery of integration solutions, by investing in highly scalable integration technology and resources that provide capability to make this information available, provide automation and help deliver these solutions quickly”.

The Ministry is going to Cabinet within the next month to get approval to develop a detailed business case for a national HIP. Integration services are key to the new platform, which will be able to assemble a virtual electronic record on an ‘as required’ basis from multiple trusted sources, eHealthNews.nz previously reported.

The ROI documents say the Ministry does not currently have the necessary integration capabilities to support a Digital Health Strategy across the sector, such as API access over secure internet connections.

Also, there is a need for better and more consistent external integration solutions to drive improved health information management across the sector and the ability to support large initiatives that have significant and complex integration requirements.

The ROI documents say that by developing its integration capabilities, the Ministry will be able to accelerate the pace of integration development and develop integrations with cloud, web and sensor- or device-based use cases.

Also, it will enable it to align with government and health interoperability standards such as the New Zealand government API standard and guidelines, FHIR and SNOMED.

The Ministry is looking for three things:

• an integration tool(s) and/or services that will allow the Ministry to deliver to immediate priorities and to improve integration delivery capability into the future a partner or partners who have the capability and capacity to support the Ministry in implementing and optimising use and value of the integration tool(s) and/or services
• other tools or services that are delivering interoperability within the health sector in innovative ways, and may have a role to play in achieving a seamless health ecosystem.

The deadline for ROI responses is 9 August 2019, then the Ministry will run a Request for Proposal. The RFP will include the option for district health boards to adopt any of the services included in the ROI.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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