The Digital Health Ecosystem Wales programme is a partnership between the Life Sciences Hub Wales (LSHW) and Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) and is funded through the Welsh Government's Digital Priorities Investment Fund.
What We're Trying to Achieve with our APIs
We want to open up the NHS Wales technical architecture to other Welsh health and care organisations, as well as partners in the public and private sector. Our aim is to provide developers and system suppliers with the understanding needed to develop against our range of digital services. The first step has been to develop a catalogue of NHS Wales APIs and incrementally expose sandbox instances of these APIs. These APIs will represent test instances of current production implementations as well as experimental APIs where we look at creating instances of existing resources in new health care interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR.
Working in an iterative and adaptive manner, we intend to develop the APIs incrementally by constantly refining what works well based on user feedback.
Management / Security Solution
We’ve identified three key components required to underpin the APIs; Developer Portal, API Management and Sandbox Environment. These components provide the infrastructure backbone that allow us to better manage and publish our API catalogue. Amongst other things they enable us to:
- more easily secure and version control each API.
- monitor performance and usage to provide better insight into how well the APIs serve our users.
- better reach our developer audience by providing self-service capabilities that allow them to learn about the APIs and how to use them.
