Public hospital organization
            

For the central authority tasked with overseeing Hong Kong’s public hospitals, sharing information is a matter of life and death. Data—collected from hospitals, clinics and connected devices—has the potential to help doctors make the right decisions, at the right time.

This potential for data to improve the lives of Hong Kongers has not gone unnoticed. In fact, the Hong Kong Government published the Smart City Blueprint in December 2017, which featured an “open data” initiative. This encourages public and private sectors to unlock their data to provide life-changing, value-added services. 

But to deliver on this promise, organizations—including the one that oversees Hong Kong’s hospitals—need to share data in a way that anyone can plug into. That way is APIs. 

However, it’s not as simple as flipping a switch. What the authority found is that it first needed to rein in its sprawl of applications — including mobile apps — that had grown over the years. It couldn’t publish APIs with complete confidence (or control) given the mishmash of technology that connected public hospitals and clinics.

The authority knew that it would need to connect everything—using cloud, microservices and IoT—to fully manage its responsibilities. As the team dug deeper, it found that its existing enterprise architecture and approach to api integration and security needed a new API management platform to tie all of the pieces together.

Flexibility is the key

Once the authority knew what it needed—an API management platform that offered uncompromising flexibility and scalability—it started looking. The team knew it needed a flexible licensing model that supported deployment on-premises and in the cloud—as well as a microservices architecture.

It soon found just what it was looking for in webMethods—a platform from a trusted technology provider that offered the gold standard in API gateway technology. 

Before long, the authority was off and running with an API management platform that allowed them manage, secure, analyze and grow APIs in a way they could track and trust. webMethods provided all of the key capabilities it needed to create a flexible and dynamic ecosystem of partners and clinics. 

Taking it from here

Hong Kong’s public hospitals and institutions and clinics are grouped into seven different clusters, representing seven population territories. Using webMethods for API management, each cluster will only have to manage its individual API gateway, which then integrates with the core systems from headquarter for daily data exchange.The authority plans to roll out and set up API gateways for all seven clusters in phases from 2021 to 2025. 

The future of the authority’s connected transformation strategy is to strengthen connectivity from clinical users to patients via IT. Now, connectivity to patients is no longer limited to hospitals and clinics but is now available anywhere, anytime.