Overview

Health New Zealand’s Digital Services Hub unlocks Aotearoa’s health information in an unprecedented way. At its core, we are delivering a centralised online platform to provides resources, documentation, tools and support for developers who want to integrate with our listed APIs and digital services.  Its purpose is to: 

  • facilitate collaboration  
  • streamline the integration process 
  • empower developers with necessary information and tools
  • foster innovation by enabling the creation of new applications and services
  • support healthcare consumers, whānau and providers to help people manage their own health. 

We provide APIs that expose key data from various data repositories and digital services that assist in performing key tasks as part of delivering quality care and information. 

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The Interoperability Platform components:  

  1. API Manager 
  2. Developer Portal 
  3. API Gateway 

API Manager 

The API Manager is at the heart of the platform. It allows us to provide consistency in the experience for both health data consumers and publishers. The key features are: 

  • consistent API policies such as rate limiting, authentication, authorisation, logging and enforcing the rules within the API specification 
  • API governance to ensure that our published APIs meet the API standards and best practices 
  • API lifecycle management from ideation to retiring services 
  • API monitoring and analytics to give insights into how the service is used and assisting in tracking down errors.

Developer Portal 

Our Developer Portal is primarily for API consumers - people building front-end applications that consume APIs. It's not just for programmers and architects – it's also for product owners, business analysts, delivery leads, testers, chief technology officers and innovators. 

It includes: 

  • process information 
  • a searchable API catalogue 
  • detailed API specifications 
  • a digital onboarding service for access to test and production APIs 
  • links to our standards and policies.

You will be required to have a My Health Account Workforce Account with an identity level of 2 or above. This means you will need to provide an official document (such as a driver licence or passport) which has then been verified to validate your identity.  To begin creating a My Health Account Workforce Account, click here.  

API Gateway 

The API Gateway is the front door to the Digital Services Hub APIs. This is our collection of endpoints that we expose to provide a highly scalable and consistent experience across all our digital products. Once you’ve been on boarded and given access to our environments, you’ll be interacting with our API gateway which enforces our API policies and allows you to hit our APIs.
 

API hosting platform - Mulesoft 

The API hosting platform is the runtime component of the API platform, and includes:  

  • API Gateway – the front door for each API, handling security and rate limiting 
  • a translation layer - an optional layer for lightweight transformations of API requests and responses 
  • mocking services and sandboxes - hosted stubs that API consumers can use for early testing 
  • authorisation server – this authenticates and authorises the calling application and end user.  
  • logging and monitoring– tools within the developer portal provide insight on how your application looks from our side 

Service level

The API platform is a platinum service, meaning: 

  • it is available and supported 24x7, 365 days 
  • it has a guaranteed availability of 99.9%,