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, and health services delivery planners, funders and decision makers.

To achieve this objective, 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 third-party software products including websites, mobile apps, and clinical systems.

Healthdirect welcomes organisations aiming to prioritise access and connection in providing healthcare information and services to consumers. Our priorities are to improve the experience and efficiency of consumer's access to care, enabling a more connected health system and delivering value.

Healthdirect Australia’s NHSD Developer and Integration Hub provides information, guidance and tools to support organisations through the integration process, from initial discovery and learning through to production go-live and post-production support.

The Developer and Integration Hub is intended to be of use to the following:

• Decision makers — those responsible for evaluating the benefits of integration with NHSD and approving the use of resources to complete the initial integration and ongoing data operations.
• Project managers — individuals responsible for project scoping/estimation and project delivery.
• Business/technical analysts — individuals tasked with analysing the people, process and technology changes that will result when integrating with the NHSD.
• Software developers and test teams — the individuals that will develop (code) and test the software systems that integrate with the NHSD.
• Data analysts/content managers — team members with an understanding of 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. This information is provided free of charge to the public and health professionals.

Healthdirect partners with government and industry to improve the breadth of available information and the quality and completeness of existing data within the Directory.

The benefits for organisations integrating with the NHSD include:

1. Streamline business operations — reduce effort and duplication by leveraging existing data management and scope of information in the NHSD.
2. Utilise a national asset — national digital health infrastructure and a key enabler of health sector interoperability, including consumption of identifiers and endpoints to enable secure messaging.
3. Reduce clinical risk — near real time access to data ensures 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. Support research and policymaking — facilitates research and accelerates the discovery of gaps within Australia’s healthcare landscape, by providing comprehensive health data to make informed decisions about healthcare policies and resource allocation.

Data sharing agreements with external organisations allow datasets to be leveraged and reused to support a variety of use cases.

For more information, download Why integrate with the NHSD.