Vensa partners with Healthpoint to give patients the choice of pharmacy collection

SECTOR UPDATE - Vensa Health and Healthpoint

The partnership will focus on the Vensa.com Platform integration with Healthpoint’s HL7 FHIR standard API to enable patient’s choice of pharmacy selection

Vensa Health (www.vensa.com), a leading New Zealand digital health company, has partnered with online directory service Healthpoint (www.healthpoint.co.nz). Healthpoint has enabled access to the online directory using a FHIR-compatible application programming interface gateway.

Vensa is on a mission to make primary care more accessible, affordable and convenient via the vensa.com platform along with its partners. Vensa Health has integrated the Healthpoint API into their Repeat Prescription vensa.com application. In recognition of the sector now feeling the aftermath of COVID, with half of the GP workforce reporting burnout, technology becomes a very important equaliser.

Patients can order their repeat script requests for themselves and their whānau and search for the nearest pharmacy based on their geo-location on their mobile, giving patients control of medication collection and timely access to medicines. In addition, the partnership enables medical centres using vensa.com to search and nominate a default pharmacy for medication collection when a patient orders a repeat script online.

The repeat prescription service is designed to be whānau centred, allowing households belonging to multiple facilities to control and manage the health of whānau from a single user profile. The pharmacy selection allows for rapid processing of the Repeat Script at the medical centre, and with plans for integration into New Zealand Electronic Prescribing Service (NZePS), the service will be further streamlined.

Healthpoint’s API infrastructure is built on the Amazon API Gateway according to the HL7® FHIR® standard which provides an easy method for third party applications, websites and health organisations to obtain content from the Healthpoint website, specifically according to their content needs.
The pharmacy data from Healthpoint is updated daily to ensure patients receive accurate and up-to-date information when ordering their repeat scripts. The Healthpoint directory receives approx 1 million viewers monthly and in 2022 impacted more than 15 million users nationwide.

Healthpoint Chief Compliance officer (CCO) John Williams said it was a long-standing goal of Healthpoint to have the directory content shared across the health system. The API will provide Vensa.com with an easy-to-use, scalable gateway for patient users to access provider information.

“Working with organisations such as Vensa to achieve integration of the Healthpoint directory is testimony that using nationally approved standards that are very developer-friendly and require little integration effort make sense for the future interoperability of digital health,” Mr Williams said.

“We are already seeing Healthpoint being more widely integrated with New Zealand healthcare.”
Vensa Health founder & managing director Ahmad Jubbawey said access to a structured directory is one area of being more whānau-centric to truly put the patient at the centre, whether they want the medications delivered or collected from a nearby pharmacy while they are on holiday.

“It is great to have the use of common FHIR standards to break down barriers of interoperability. At the end of the day, it's about being patient-centric to give whānau access to the care they need and remove barriers by creating capability and capacity for practice teams”.

Vensa currently supports 55% of General Practice Clinics nationally and impacts 3.6 million mobile numbers. Their patient portal registrations are growing rapidly and are currently in excess of 60,000.

Source: Vensa Health and Healthpoint media release

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