The development of a national primary care data service for New Zealand is still on the drawing-board despite hopes it would be up and running by now, with its backers looking towards 2020 to get the initiative off the ground.

The big four primary healthcare organisations (PHOs) and some partners went to the market in 2017 for expressions of interest in developing and operating the service, which they envisaged would bring together a number of currently fragmented data sets to provide a comparative view of population health for the whole country.