Kia ora katou, Te Whatu Ora - Health NZ is moving towards an event-driven model for information exchange between internal and external systems, and one way that we can do this is by publishing event notifications via our National Event Management Service (NEMS).
These notifications are communicated to subscribing systems by way of a lightweight message sent by NEMS to any system subscribing to that ‘topic’. Notification messages usually only contain some contextual information about what has changed, and not the changed information itself. The subscribing system can then respond to the notification by fetching the relevant information from the publisher as needed.
The scope of NEMS is events of regional or national significance, so over time we envisage that it will be used widely as a integration solution to enable transactional information exchange between key healthcare systems that perhaps previously were isolated from other important information sources, or relied on manual processing of information.
You can read about our growing list of NEMS topics here: https://tewhatuora.github.io/nems-documentation/Event%20Design/
One of the new topics currently under consideration is the ‘NHI change event’, which will be used to notify systems of changes to patient records in the NHI database.
We would be very interested to hear of any use-cases or requirements that others across the health sector may have for this event.
For example, you might be interested only in updates for patients enrolled with a specific primary care organisation, so to enable this we would include in the notification the organisation ID (where present) for the enrolling practice. Subscribing systems could set up their subscription to only receive notifications for that particular organisation.
What other information might you want to see in the notification message to help your system decide how to respond?
Examples of how your systems might benefit from this NEMS topic:
Notification of birth
Notification of death
Notification of a patient moving into your geographical catchment area
Notification of a patient reaching a certain age group
Notification of a patient changing their contact details or residential address
Notification of a patient changing their identity details (name, gender, ethnicity, title)
Discussion welcome.