What’s New in Halo: Desktop API, Webhooks, Integrator Portal, and FHIR Enhancements

Features

New Desktop API

Now available is our new Desktop API, which will enable desktop applications to securely connect to Halo Cloud with a different authentication workflow, based on the standard JWT protocol. This will enable integrators with desktop applications to avoid proxying all API requests through their cloud.

The new Desktop API is now available in staging. Please refer to our docs for details and supported PMSs.

Webhook notifications

Webhooks have been a highly requested feature from integrators since launch, as they eliminate the need for polling and can reduce round-trip time. Thank you to those who gave feedback on the MVP released late last year — that feedback has now been consolidated, and development is almost complete. These improvements will focus on enhancing security, scalability, and reliability without breaking the existing functionality for anyone already utilising them.

Integrator Portal

To empower integrators with self-service support and help non-technical staff perform tasks like checking practice connection status, we've developed an integrator portal website.

We released an MVP portal to staging in late 2024 that includes two common support features and basic OAuth authentication. Following feedback, we've improved the authentication system ahead of a production release in the coming weeks.

Though we're starting with a small feature set, we have many future enhancements planned —please let us know if you have any suggestions!

FHIR API for Bp Premier

We've been working hard to get the FHIR API coverage to a point where it can support enough common use cases that many integrations could be implemented using purely FHIR and no custom SQL. With 20+ resources and several more custom components implemented, we’re pretty excited about what this enables, and we’ve started on some of the bigger picture pieces of the FHIR ecosystem.

Alongside a whole host of bug fixes, the major FHIR improvements have been:

New clinical resources

Six new clinical resources have been implemented:

• AllergyIntolerance and Immunization were released to production in February
• Medication, MedicationStatement, and MedicationRequest are now in staging
• Condition is in QA, and should be released by the end of Q2

These resources were implemented as part of a project to add support for the International Patient Summary (IPS), which was demonstrated by Best Practice and Oracle at the CSIRO Sparked event in March. More information regarding this feature, such as release dates and documentation, will be available soon. Feel free to reach out if you would like to know more.

Create and update operations

Until this year, the FHIR API only supported read operations. We’re now in the process of adding some key write functionality:

• Patient create (already available)
• Patient update (in QA)
• Appointment create, update, and delete
• AppointmentResponse, including read and write operations

FHIR Implementation Guide (IG)

FHIR not only provides a standard for data exchange but also includes guidelines for documenting FHIR APIs through Implementation Guides (IGs). Since integrators familiar with the FHIR ecosystem are accustomed to reading these IGs, we've developed one specifically for the FHIR API for Bp Premier.

The IG, which will be published in the Bp Knowledge Base soon, includes profiles for all currently released resources plus higher-level documentation explaining how to use the FHIR API and any particular quirks of our implementation.

Security

Another layer of SQL injection prevention

Many health applications operate on user input, the processing of which inherently runs the risk of SQL injection attacks.

This latest improvement to the FHIR API adds another layer of defense against user input-based attacks, reducing risk and strengthening security both for the FHIR API and for any integrators using it.

This change is already in production.

Feedback

If you would like to know more about any of the features we have coming down the line, or would like to talk about how these improvements will fit your use case, please feel free to reach out to support@haloconnect.io.