Digital Partnership Program (DPP) - NDIA APIs

NDIS Digital Partnership Program (DPP) Discussion Paper

In 2020, the NDIA recently provided preliminary information on the new NDIS Digitial Partnership Program (DPP), and the Digitial Partnership Office (DPO) established to govern it. 

To encourage collaboration around the establishment of these industry-critical technologies, the DPO published the NDIS Digital Partnership Program (DPP) Discussion Paper, which outlines the proposed new APIs and the DPP's processes that surround them.

SupportAbility felt strongly that we could add value to the process of establishing these APIs and improve their quality and utility for providers. As such, time was spent working to share our knowledge and experience in the field of APIs using the feedback mechanism opened by the Digital Partnership Office (DPO). This feedback was developed in the spirit of collaboration to aid the NDIS, the new DPO, SupportAbility subscribers and the industry as a whole.

In March 2020, we submitted SupportAbility's official response and feedback to the Digital Partnership Program Discussion Paper. 

Access to the Draft APIs

In March 2020, we also submitted a registration application in collaboration with one of our subscribing providers, listing our role as consultants so that we could access the API and start exploring its architecture, stability and value to providers.

Our application was approved in May 2020, and in July 2020, the Digitial Partnership Office (DPO) provided us with access to the draft API.  Our engineers explored the APIs and found a significant number of issues that were reported back to the DPO to provide valuable feedback in the hope that this could be used to improve the APIs and get them to a point where they would be suitable for commercial and production purposes.

Registering as a Software Vendor under the DPP

In May 2020, the DPO launched the DPP program's second phase, which allows software vendors such as SupportAbility to access the API for multiple vendors and integrate API transactions into their product. 

Following discussions with the DPO, we are currently undertaking the ISO 27001 Information security management certification process so that we can register and access the NDIS APIs in a vendor capacity. We expect the ISO 27001 certification project to be completed in 2022. Following this, we will be undertaking our Software Vendor DPO Registration.