Migrating NZePS to Microsoft Azure

FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - Whānau Tahi

Use of the NZ ePrescription Service (NZePS) grew rapidly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to improve stability, security and scalability, service provider Whānau Tahi migrated the NZePS to Microsoft Azure.

NZePS provides a core platform for the secure exchange of electronic prescription and dispensing information between authorised prescribing and dispensing organisations and systems and to-date has been primarily focussed on community prescribed and dispensed medications.

Pre Covid-19, while dispensing systems were using NZePS for all community based dispensing, uptake of the service was relatively low from prescribing systems at around 16 percent of general practices in March 2019.

When Covid-19 hit New Zealand’s shores, the opportunity to deliver benefit to the community via paperless prescribing was recognised. The service became critical as general practices rapidly switched to a digital first approach when caring for patients and the number of GPs sending prescriptions electronically has been steadily climbing since.

The total number of NZePS compliant eScripts being issued rose from around 620,000 in March 2020, to more than 1.5 million in March 2022.

Migrating to the cloud
Whānau Tahi provides managed application and hosting services for NZePS, the end-to-end system that supports the transmission of prescriptions from GP practices (typically), through to dispensing at a pharmacy, on behalf of Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand.

The service was previously hosted ‘on-premise’, on an older technology stack, which made it difficult to scale and maintain performance. It prevented the use of many modern tools available in the cloud, to improve security, stability, performance, compliance and integration.

With the increase in cloud-based solutions and cloud-first strategy adopted by Te Whatu Ora, there was an opportunity to modernise NZePS infrastructure.

Allan Blackwell, Whānau Tahi, chief technology officer, says the move to Azure is part of an organisation-wide drive to modernise Whānau Tahi services and leverage the cloud.

The significant uptake and transactional nature of NZePS, combined with its need for high performance, made it a great candidate to shift first, and the move was completed in December 2021.

“We saw a huge opportunity to move from our traditional hosting environment to the cloud,” says Blackwell.

“The Azure product is really robust, and we have improved our backup and disaster recovery abilities.”

He says moving to Azure unlocks the ability for Whānau Tahi to transform at scale.

“It was a challenge, but in conjunction with our partners Parallo and Defend, we moved one of the largest workloads out of an inflexible on-premise infrastructure stack to a modern flexible highly tooled cloud technology stack.”

Stable and secure
NZePS is a critical system in Aotearoa New Zealand’s data and digital health landscape and security and privacy is of utmost importance.

Clinton George, chief information and security officer Whānau Tahi, says the use of the Azure platform enables to deliver a highly secure and compliant product to the health system.

“We now have improved resilience, improved performance and improved ability for others to integrate with the service. We are leveraging the Azure technology stack tools including self-healing, cloud monitoring and platform management,” he says.

“With the move to Azure, we now have access to a wider range of cloud management tools, improved security and performance management tools, and improved tools for development operations, code and change management.

“We also have the ability to introduce extra security layers such as multifactor authentication and conditional access really easily,” George adds.

“The investment in Azure underpins a lot of what we do. We've got a great secure work environment that enables us to be able to work really effectively on the product, and with the product.”

George says the cloud platform enables the 24-hour monitoring of the platform, application and security and by “making use of the huge smarts that you get in Azure” they have achieved an exceptional overall uplift in security.

Integrating and expanding
A number of digital health suppliers, such as those providing practice management systems for GPs, need to integrate with NZePS to enable their customers to access the service.

Blackwell says migrating to the cloud has enabled Whānau Tahi to respond to requirements from Te Whatu Ora Medicines Digital strategy team to enhance NZePS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) using modern security techniques and to align with modern FHIR API standards.

Processing times in NZePS have also been reduced, which reduces time taken to draw down scripts to be dispensed at the pharmacy.

“The Azure platform allows us to track and observe performance and scale as needed. You get immediate feedback and insight into service performance, which is of massive value to the whole health sector,” Blackwell says.

“We have increased our agility and ability to innovate faster and deliver benefits to our customers and the wider health system.”

If you would like to provide feedback on the above feature article please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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