Not-for-profit IT services organisation Patients First is closing down at the end of the year, transitioning control of its services to the New Zealand Ministry of Health.

Patients First was set up over a decade ago to provide a number of interoperability services, most notably the GP2GP electronic medical record transfer system.

GP2GP went live in 2012 and is a standards-based approach to transfer medical records between different practice management systems (PMS) when patients change practices.