Globally, populations move between general practice, community services, hospitals, and specialist care. Yet in New Zealand, the information clinicians need is often stored across separate systems, making it difficult to build a complete and useful picture of a person’s health history. Patients repeat their story, while clinicians spend valuable time searching for, validating, and reconciling information.
Connecting health information in a way that is trusted, secure, and clinically useful has remained one of New Zealand’s most complex digital health challenges.
The Shared Digital Health Record (SDHR) is changing that.
It builds upon key identity foundations, like New Zealand’s National Health Index (NHI), established over three decades ago, and national datasets for medicines and immunisations to enable data sharing across care settings. We are leveraging interoperability standards like FHIR, with direct integrations into clinical systems already in use.
Privacy-by-design ensures patient choice sits at the core of the system, with simple confidentiality settings, real-time auditing, data governance controls, and access review processes to ensure information is only used for approved purposes.
This is complemented by robust engagement with health providers to establish new national agreements that lay out mutual obligations to protect personal information when it is shared.
Today, we are rolling out to primary care providers to share data from their practice management systems, with national access to core patient information being available by mid-2027.
There is more to do. However, the achievements to date demonstrate how complex interoperability, governance, privacy, and trust challenges can be solved successfully at national scale.