API platform

The NHS England API platform is the centralised hub for building, hosting, and securely accessing APIs to integrate with all digital services within the NHS ecosystem.

The API platform is specifically designed to support the development and integration of point-of-care and patient-facing Apps, empowering users to access patient information and healthcare services safely and efficiently.

The platform is free for hosting APIs that serve the NHS and runs on the robust and scalable Apigee infrastructure. It features the innovative Proxy Generator API, which automates API hosting and integration, enabling API developers to create and deploy API proxies.

With robust tools, comprehensive tutorials, and streamlined self-service capabilities, the platform simplifies the API development process while ensuring compliance with NHS information governance standards and policies. Acting as a secure gateway to NHS systems, it facilitates seamless integration and reliable performance for developers.

For API developer teams, the platform provides a high-quality API development ecosystem that drives innovation, reduces development costs, and accelerates time-to-market. It also aligns with NHS England’s Data Saves Lives and Open API policies to deliver secure, consistent and high-quality API experiences for developers, healthcare professionals and patients alike.

The API platform is part of our mission to make integration easier, and provides benefits for both API consumers and API producers.

For API consumers, the API platform provides: 

• a consistent, modern experience using open standards such as REST, FHIR and OAuth 2.0 

• self-service and immediate access to test environments

• quicker and easier access to production using our digital onboarding service 

• access from the internet, as well as HSCN 

• documentation that is clear, consistent and comprehensive, using OAS for API specifications

• a single point of contact for help and support

For API producers, the API platform provides: 

• quicker and more predictable delivery using our easy-to-follow API delivery process 

• get started quickly using our one-click API platform set-up tool

• full customisation, with plug-and-play modules for authorisation, rate limiting, logging, monitoring and alerting 

• a full CI/CD pipeline, including multiple path-to-live environments 

• quick and easy API documentation using OAS

• comprehensive self-service technical and non-technical guidance in our API producer zone (account required)

• dedicated technical and non-technical support

• a free proxy generating API (Proxygen) that allows producers to build proxies within hours rather than days

By making integration easier, we provide a number of benefits to the wider NHS:

• API producers and consumers can get useful integrated software deployed quicker and cheaper, meaning there's more time to add and improve features
• the lower barrier to entry allows more software providers into the marketplace, creating an environment for digital innovation to thrive whilst pushing down software costs to the NHS
• healthcare workers and patients have a wider variety of well-integrated software to choose from, meaning they are more likely to have the information they need, when and where they need it

The API platform is for API consumers and API producers, primarily for use by the NHS in England. 

You can only use the API platform for APIs or services that support the delivery of health and care for the NHS in England, although there are some exceptions to this rule. We operate a 'platform' model where you build and run your own API, using our tools with our help and support.

Our API platform has a hybrid technology stack, using a blend of proprietary products, open source and bespoke code.

Specifically, at the time of writing (January 2025), we are using:

• Google Apigee Edge as our core API platform tool - which is hosted in the cloud on Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our hosting solution for custom components - which are generally written in Python or .NET C# and deployed as Docker containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• Microsoft Azure Pipelines for our deployment pipelines
• KeyCloak as our developer identity provider
• GitHub to host our source code
• LocalStack for local testing
• Terraform for infrastructure management
• Splunk, Grafana and Prometheus for logging monitoring and alerting
• Discourse for our developer community forum

Our bespoke code, including the code for all our API proxies, is mostly coded in the open and is hosted in our GitHub repositories.

We welcome contributions from the developer community - but we're not always watching out for them, so if you do raise a pull request, you might want to contact us to let us know.

API consumers

To get started as an API consumer, see the developer and integration hub.

API producers

To get started as an API producer, see Building healthcare APIs.

The API platform is live and is a platinum service, meaning:

• it is available and supported 24 x 7 x 365
• it has a guaranteed availability of 99.9%, although actual availability is higher - for example in 2021 it was 99.995%

The API platform was launched in 2020, as part of our mission to make integration easier and exited beta in March 2022.

The first API we built on the platform was the Personal Demographics Service FHIR API. This is our 'exemplar' API – a demonstration of what good looks like. 

Since then, all new NHS England APIs have been built on the platform, and we have been working to migrate our existing APIs to the platform. This is likely to take some time.

You can check on our progress by viewing our API and integration catalogue, filtered on API platform APIs.

At the time of writing, December 2024, timelines are currently being agreed, but some high level roadmap items are:

• migration from Apigee Edge to Apigee X
• further iterative Proxygen enhancements
• AI tooling through the Google API Hub

For details of case studies, see Case studies.

The following table shows how to contact us about this service.

The following services are related to the API platform: