Developer and Integration Hub

As government-funded national digital health infrastructure, Healthdirect Australia aims to ensure the accessibility and use of the NHSD for all, including consumers, healthcare providers, researchers, technology vendors and health service delivery planners, funders and decision makers.

To achieve this, Healthdirect supports and enables government, commercial and other organisations and their software developers to integrate with the NHSD through standards based (FHIR) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and embeddable widgets to implement the NHSD within websites, mobile apps, and clinical systems.

The Developer and Integration Hub provides information, guidance and tools to support organisations through the process of integration with the NHSD to access health service information for clinical systems and applications in support of furthering interoperability within Australia’s healthcare system.

The Developer and Integration Hub is intended to be used by:

• Decision makers who evaluate the benefits of integration with the NHSD and approve the use of resources to complete the initial integration and ongoing data operations.
• Project managers who scope and estimate project schedule delivery.
• Business and technical analysts who analyse the people, process and technology changes when integrating with the NHSD.
• Software developers and test teams who develop, code and test software systems that integrate with the NHSD.
• Data analysts and content managers who review and understand the integration specifications and data model.  

Benefits of integrating with the NHSD

The NHSD provides nationally consistent, authoritative, reliable and easily accessible information about health services that is provided free of charge to integration partners.

Healthdirect forms partnerships with government and industry to improve the breadth of information and the quality and completeness of data within the NHSD.

The benefits for organisations integrating with the NHSD include:

1. Streamlining business operations reducing effort and duplication by leveraging existing data management and scope of information.
2. Accessing a national asset part of national digital health infrastructure and a key enabler of health sector interoperability, including consumption of identifiers and endpoints to enable secure messaging.
3. Reducing clinical risk with near real time access to data ensuring data currency and quality when executing health sector transactions such as discharge summaries and electronic referrals, resulting in better transition of care and outcomes for patients.
4. Supporting research and policymaking with comprehensive health data to facilitate research and support informed decisions about healthcare policies and resource allocation.
5. Improving the delivery of digital services to consumers by making health service and practitioner data available for consumer search via the Healthdirect Service Finder, Symptom Checker and Nurse Triage service (1800 Medicare).

For more information, download Why integrate with the NHSD.