National Event Management Service moving to production in March

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The National Event Management Service (NEMS) has been successfully piloted and is expected to be in production in March 2024.

NEMS is an event broker system enabling notification of data changes from one system to multiple other systems, such as a patient’s change of address or their presentation to an emergency department.

Gerard Keenan, director Hira programme and technology enablers, says NEMS will give healthcare providers much better visibility of what is happening to patients outside of their direct healthcare setting.

Information is also fed directly into subscriber systems, reducing the need for manual updates.

The pilot tested the connection between various systems, by notifying a small group of health sector subscribers of a death. The publisher was the Health Identity Platform and notifications were based on death information from the National Health Index..

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This was successfully completed in December 2023 and from April 2024 it is planned to extend to areas other than deaths, as well as onboarding new subscribers to the death event.

Keenan says each day there are over 700,000 data changes in the health system and the new service will enable the right data to get to the right people at the right time.

Currently information is captured in one healthcare information system – such as a hospital’s patient administration system - but not all healthcare providers that need this information are alerted because of a lack of interoperability.

“With NEMS, the update is made once, in one system (the publishing system) and then communicated to the other systems (subscriber systems). Information systems subscribe to events, which they get when there has been a change in a person’s information linked to their National Health Index (NHI) number,” Keenan explains.

Solace is the publish-subscribe message broker being used for NEMS.

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