The team behind the development of Hira, New Zealand's national health information platform, has recently shared its plan to build a connector plane that will provide application developers access to Hira APIs 

Based on a recent update, the connector plane will provide a "single, secure point of access to APIs that are supported by Hira." It adds that the technology will "enable health information to be securely accessed, shared, and updated."

HOW IT WORKS

The Hira programme is supporting developers to build innovative applications that use Hira APIs. On these applications, API gateways and the connector plane will work in the background to validate a user's login credentials before providing access to data, explained Hira technology and delivery director Gerard Keenan. "Auditing and reporting [will] take place at the same time," he added.

According to Keenan, privacy and security features are currently being built into the connector plane, which is aimed to be in production later this year. 

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Hira is currently in its first phase of implementation, which involves the development of the New Zealand patient summary. Targeted to be released by mid-2024, the patient summary will provide consumers and healthcare providers access to essential health information, such as demographics, medicines, vaccination status, and lab results. 

Meanwhile, the Hira team introduced in June a new FHIR-based API that will provide users access to the Medicines Data Repository.

An event notification service is also being planned to be added to the platform soon once the team can choose a provider via a proposal request process. This feature will allow healthcare providers to know the changes in their patients' information.