Hira Marketplace launches

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

Monday, 27 March 2023

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A new Hira Marketplace houses seven application programming interfaces (APIs) and three digital services to enable the better flow of health information.

Vendors and healthcare providers can use the Marketplace to find APIs to connect to health information from national data repositories, such as the National Health Index, and other trusted sources.

The latest Hira update says Aotearoa New Zealand has many data sources, APIs and digital services, but until now there hasn’t been one place to house them all.

“Marketplace is a hub providing access to APIs and digital services,” it says.

“In time, Marketplace will provide access to a developer portal so vendors can onboard to the APIs Te Whatu Ora publishes though an electronic workflow.”

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Hira was established in October 2021 with the approval of the Tranche 1 business case by Cabinet. The programme is being delivered in three tranches.

Budget 2022 allocated $220 million in operating and $100m in capital funding over the next four years to ‘health data, digital – foundations and innovation’, which built on Budget 2021 investments and included funding for Hira tranche two.

The business case says Hira is about developing a “whole new way for different data systems to connect, so a person’s health information can be provided in one place”.

The latest Hira update says the programme underwent a significant reset in 2022 and a rescoping of the work programme is nearly complete. Ray Delany took on the role of Hira Programme director in September last year.

The current focus is on tranche one, which includes technology enablers such as digital identity and interoperability services.

The seven APIs available in the new Marketplace are; Cardiovascular Disease Risk Assessment; eSAM Address Web Service; Healthpoint API; Health Provider Index; Medicines Data Repository; National Health Index; and the NZ Health Terminology Service.

After being launched at Digital Health Week 2022, the New Zealand Health Terminology Service (NZHTS) is doing monthly releases of new content.

Releases so far include codes for reporting adverse reactions to medicines (MedDRA), ISO country codes, NHI and Health Provider Index (HPI) code sets, and FHIR NZ Base Code Sets.

NZ Pathology Observation Code Sets (NZPOCS) and the first two sections of the NZ International Patient Summary (NZIPS) code sets were released in February and Aotearoa Immunisation Register (AIR) code sets will be released in the next few months.