API platform

The NHS England API platform is a ‘front door’ for health and care APIs, primarily for the NHS in England. 

APIs are used by point-of-care applications and patient-facing applications to talk to back-end applications. 

Most of the back-end applications are owned by NHS England, but some are owned by third parties. 

The platform provides a consistent experience for API consumers and API producers that makes integration easier and supports NHS England's Data saves lives and Open API policies.

The API platform has three components:

• the API hosting platform

• the developer hub (including digital onboarding)

• the API producer zone

The API hosting platform is the runtime component of the API platform, and includes: 

• API proxies – the front door for each API, handling security and rate limiting

• a translation layer - an optional layer for lightweight transformations of API requests and responses

• sandboxes - hosted stubs that API consumers can use for early testing

• an authorisation server – this authenticates and authorises the calling application and end user, and is integrated with NHS Care Identity Service 2 and NHS login 

• logging, monitoring and alerting – tools to keep the platform healthy 

The developer hub is for API consumers - people building front-end applications that consume APIs. It's not just for programmers and architects – it's also for product owners, business analysts, delivery leads, testers, CTOs and entrepreneurs.

It includes:

• getting started information, including tutorials

• a searchable API catalogue

• detailed API specifications

• self-service access to test environments

• a digital onboarding service for access to production

• help and support, including our developer community for support-in-the-open and peer-to-peer support

Some of the features require you to create an NHS England developer account.

The API producer zone (account required) is for API producers - people building back-end applications that expose APIs, including:

• technical and non-technical people
• NHS England and third party people

It includes:

• self-service API producer guidance, both technical and process
• technical support
• non-technical support
• lightweight governance - to ensure APIs are built to a consistent quality

Currently, you need an NHS England Confluence account to access the API producer zone. To get access, see getting started.

The API platform is a platinum service, meaning:

• it is available and supported 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• it has a guaranteed availability of 99.9%, although actual availability is much higher - for example in 2021 it was 99.995%

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

It has been described as ‘exemplary’ by the Government Digital Service.

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 when you’re stuck

In surveys, 100% of API consumers have rated the API platform as either ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ to use overall (as of February 2022).

For the results of our latest survey, see Developer integration survey - January 2023.

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 (aka swagger) 

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

• dedicated technical and non-technical support for when you’re stuck

One API producer said they were 'frankly astonished' at how quickly they were able to set up their API on our platform.

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

• API producers and consumers can get useful, integrated software to market quicker and cheaper
• ...which gives them more time to add and improve features
• the lower barrier to entry allows more software providers into the marketplace
• ...which creates an environment for digital innovation to thrive
• ...and pushes down software costs to the NHS
• healthcare workers and patients have a wider variety of well-integrated software to choose from
• ...which means they are more likely to have the information they need, when and where they need it

The API platform was launched in 2020, as part of our mission to make integration easier. It exited beta in March 2022, apart from the developer account, which is still in beta.

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 catalogue, filtered on API platform APIs.

You can see what’s in the pipeline by viewing our interactive product backlog. This includes upcoming APIs as well as API platform features.

For details of case studies, see Case studies.

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

Specifically, at the time of writing (27 April 2022), 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
• FeatureUpvote for our interactive product backlog

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 hub.

API producers

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