We now have the beginnings of digital identity management for health in NZ with the recent launching of the beta version of My Health Account. Congratulations to @shayne.hunter@jon_herries and the team at the Ministry to bring this together. I’m really looking forward to how this evolves not just over the short term to help us manage COVID, but also over the medium to longer term as a digital identity management tool for patients in the future.
Below is a link to a writeup on it from HINZ news, and below that is the link so you can try it out for yourself. I found it easy to create my digital identity. You can choose between using your email or a RealME account to sign up.
I’ll be watching with interest to see what features are added in time. What would be on your wishlist to have added?
In time it would be great to see it as a launching screen for patients to receive health info from a variety of providers, although this may not be the initial priority with the initial COVID vaccine use case.
This has now been updated so you can see your vaccination details. I wonder how it will evolve to allow sharing of your COVID states with other large organisations such as your DHB employer? Hopefully an efficient interface will be developed that allows you to give the employer permission to see your vaccination status, then have them correlate it to their database of employees without manual transcription.
The My Health Record digital identity is a huge step forward in our digital health journey in NZ. Congratulations to all those who have made this first step possible.
I echo Damon’s congrats. The @hnz-tewhatuora is turning out to be a pretty damn good software development house!
My feedback:
It could do with its own favicon. Awhina also uses the nice Ministry one (and could do with its own too!)
As it appears to be a PWA, it would be nice to have an ‘install’ option. People seem to cope much better with mobile ‘apps’ as a concept than mobile websites.
Thanks - the team realises this is only the start. Turns out building the app is the easy bit, the tricky bits are making the reliable services that serve it in a way we can then open up to other providers.
Will make a suggestion on the PWA favicon and how we might add it to the Google play store (apparently you can add webapps to here but not the Apple store).