Building healthcare APIs

This page explains what’s involved in building healthcare APIs for the NHS in England, and how our API platform can help.

It applies to anyone who is thinking of building a healthcare API with national applicability – whether for NHS England or for a third party.

There is more to building a good API than you might think - hands-on coding is only around 20% of the work.

Other tasks include:

• writing API documentation
• setting up test environments and test data
• designing and running the ‘onboarding’ process for API consumers
• providing help and support to API consumers
• marketing your API and getting people to use it

Over the years we’ve gathered a lot of feedback on what a good API looks like, primarily from people who are actually building healthcare software. We’ve incorporated the key points into our API policies and best practice.

These policies are mandatory for NHS England and strongly recommended for everyone else.

Our API platform makes building APIs easier, and provides many of the features you need to build a good API, including:

• a cloud-based hosting platform for your API, with plug-and-play security, rate limiting, logging, monitoring and alerting
• an API catalogue where you can publish your API specification
• extensive documentation for API producers, including a step-by-step API delivery process
• technical and non-technical support for API producers, including extensive documentation and a step-by-step delivery process
• self-service access to test environments for API consumers
• a digital onboarding tool for API consumer onboarding
• first line support and a developer community forum for API consumers

You can use our API platform to expose APIs for:

• NHS England back-end applications
• third party back-end applications

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 - you build and run your own API, using our tools and with our help and support.

The API platform is centrally funded - it's free of charge for NHS England and third party API producers. This is subject to a reasonable use policy, and also might change in the future.

Use of the API platform, including third party use, is underpinned by our legal directions.

Our API delivery process includes all the steps needed to build and run a good API.

Our process is based on the GOV.UK agile delivery process, but with an API focus.

For detailed guidance on building healthcare APIs, see our API producer zone. To use many of NHS England's systems, developers will need NHS shortcodes and an HSCIC email address. You will also need an nhs.net address to get access to Confluence.

In the meantime, you can download:

• our API Producer Overview slide deck
• a snapshot of the API producer zone as a PDF file - taken on 12 January 2024 and with some sensitive information removed