NHS Digital has opened a new survey calling for feedback from developers working on health and care products to support the NHS Digital API Management team.
The survey follows the publication last month of NHS Digital’s vision and roadmap for API management, and aims to improve the support that’s offered to developers through its 11-question survey.
Following feedback from the survey, the API team hope to decide what channels to use to provide useful information and understand the ways developers would like to access specific tools they need. The survey also aims to understand the respondent’s views on self-service, tutorials, support issues, and its help centre.
Further questions then go on to understand if the respondent has contacted the NHS Digital API support team in the last 12 months, the current use of APIs, and if the respondent develops or builds any products using the APIs.
In December 2021, the central body published its vision for API management, with the direction of travel to ‘unlock its platforms’ and ‘develop open standards and APIs’, which it hopes will ‘create an environment for digital innovation to thrive’.
NHS Digital outlined its mission to ‘make integration easier’, noting: “For everyone who wants to connect to our platforms and services – from large, well-established software houses to small start-ups. Whether you’re already using our APIs, or want to connect for the very first time, we’re here to listen to you and make that journey easier and faster.”
The document goes on to highlight how it will achieve this, including: building an API platform – a one-stop shop for all its APIs, old and new; building an exemplar API – the Personal Demographics Service FHIR API; migrating other APIs to the platform; and sunsetting (deprecating and retiring) older APIs, as and when appropriate, in line with its policy.
The general theme of its principles in the document, is to make designing, building, testing, on boarding, and learning, easier. The publication also details the development roadmap for APIs and platform features.
To find out more, visit the NHS Digital website here.
