New Zealand Health Terminology Service (NZHTS) Implementation Guide - Local Development build (v0.9.0) built by the FHIR (HL7® FHIR® Standard) Build Tools. See the Directory of published versions

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Official URL: https://fhir-ig.digital.health.nz/nzhts/ImplementationGuide/tewhatuora.nzhts				Version: 0.9.0
Active as of 2026-08-17				Computable Name: nzhts

NZHTS

The New Zealand Health Terminology Service (NZHTS) is the national health terminology service run by Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora. It is an instance of Ontoserver, publishing and serving terminology as an FHIR R4 terminology service API.

This IG provides guidance on using NZHTS with FHIR. It focuses on the integration of terminology with FHIR tooling and how to use NZ terminology in FHIR IGs, rather than the clinical governance of individual terminologies or other NZHTS capabilities (such as the authoring platform). For more general NZHTS information, see the NZHTS home page.

This topics covered by each page are:

• How to use NZHTS as part of the wider HL7 FHIR terminology ecosystem including with terminology for which NZHTS is declared as the authoratitive server. See the Tx-ecosystem page.
• How to to use authentication with the IG Publisher to access licenced content on NZHTS (incl. NZ edition SNOMED CT).
• Guidance on using the NZ Edition of SNOMED in FHIR IGs.
• Architectural guidance on expected NZHTS usage patterns.
• Examples with descriptions of implicit ValueSets and extensionally defined NZ edition SNOMED CodeSystem fragments and instances using those examples

The production FHIR terminology endpoint is https://nzhts.digital.health.nz/fhir. The included NZHTS CapabilityStatement describes the server's supported functionality. This can also be retreived directly from https://nzhts.digital.health.nz/fhir/metadata

References

• Health New Zealand NZHTS overview
• NZHTS Ontoserver Dashboard
• NZHTS API examples on GitHub
• HNZ Digital Services Hub
• FHIR R4 Terminology module documentation
• FHIR R4 Terminology service documentation

Version

This is an R4 IG. None of the features it uses are changed in R4B, so it can be used as is with R4B systems. Packages for both R4 (tewhatuora.nzhts.r4) and R4B (tewhatuora.nzhts.r4b) are available.

Intellectual property

This publication includes IP covered under the following statements.

• This material contains content that is copyright of SNOMED International. Implementers of these specifications must have the appropriate SNOMED CT Affiliate license - for more information contact https://www.snomed.org/get-snomed or info@snomed.org.
  Show Usage
  • SNOMED Clinical Terms® (SNOMED CT®): Immunization/covid-immunisation-example, NZSmokingStatus, Observation/immunisation-reaction-event-example and Observation/smoking-status-example