It is a fair question: if Health New Zealand already gives me My Health Record, and my GP gives me a patient portal, why would I keep a health record of my own as well?
The short version is that they are different kinds of thing. My Health Record and your GP’s portal are windows onto records that someone else holds about you. A personal health record app is your own copy, which you fill in and nobody sees unless you decide they should. Most people are better off with both.
Disclosure
I am a doctor, and I founded exora, which is a personal health record app. So I have a stake in one half of this comparison, and you should read it accordingly.
What I have tried to do about that: describe the official tools fairly, including what they do better than any app can, and be specific about where a personal health record app, mine included, does not help. If you want a wider comparison of the apps New Zealanders can use, I wrote one here.
The short answer
- My Health Record is Health New Zealand’s national website, at my.health.nz. It shows your immunisations, COVID-19 test results and some of your NHI details. It does not hold your GP notes or hospital letters.
- My Health Account is not a record at all. It is the login that proves who you are, and it is what you use to get into My Health Record.
- Your GP’s patient portal, such as ManageMyHealth, Myindici or Well, is usually the best view of your GP record. Your practice chooses the portal and decides what it shares.
- A personal health record app is a private record you create and control. You fill it in, by uploading documents or typing. Nobody can see it, including your doctor, unless you share it.
My Health Account: the login, not the record
The names are easy to mix up, so this first. Health New Zealand describes My Health Account as “a digital identity service that helps prove who you are”. It is open to people in New Zealand aged 16 and over, and it is the single login for a handful of Health New Zealand online services, of which My Health Record is the main one for patients. Health New Zealand says other services will be linked to it over time.
What My Health Record actually shows
New Zealand’s My Health Record shares its name with Australia’s national service, but it is much narrower. According to Health New Zealand’s page (last updated 22 July 2026), it lets you:
- view your immunisation records back to 2005, and have them emailed to you as a PDF
- view your COVID-19 test results, and report a test for yourself or someone else
- view your details on the National Health Index (NHI), and update your name, address, ethnic group and gender
- see your High Use Health Card and Community Services Card entitlements
- see the immunisation records of children under 12 you are eligible to link to your account
You need to be 16 or over. Accounts start at a “Basic” identification level, which shows only COVID-19 and NHI information; to see your wider immunisation history you need to reach the “Complete” level, by confirming your identity through My Health Account. Health New Zealand says more information will be added over time.
What it does not show is just as important. It does not hold your GP notes, hospital letters, discharge summaries, medications, or lab results other than COVID-19 tests. It is a website rather than an app: Health New Zealand’s websites and apps page lists no national patient app, checked 9 November 2026.
What it is genuinely good at: a full immunisation history, free and official, which is exactly what schools, employers and travel clinics ask for.
Your GP’s patient portal
For most New Zealanders, the best view of their actual medical record is the patient portal their GP practice uses. You do not choose it; your practice does. The main ones are ManageMyHealth, Myindici and Well, and some GP providers have their own app. Depending on the portal and the practice, you may be able to see lab results, medications, conditions, allergies and immunisations, and sometimes consultation notes, as well as book appointments and order repeats.
Two things limit it, and both are stated by the portals themselves. ManageMyHealth’s FAQ says “your GP practice decides which information to share to your portal”, and that while viewing your information is free, your practice may charge for some services, such as a repeat prescription. And a portal shows your record at your current practice. Hospital records, private specialists, care at a previous practice and anything from overseas are usually outside it. If you change practices, you may change portals too.
One more thing worth knowing if you use ManageMyHealth. In late 2025 an attacker got into its Health Documents area, and the company confirmed the breach on 31 December 2025. RNZ reports that about 125,000 people’s data was taken, and that users were urged to turn on two-factor authentication and watch for medical bills or insurance claims they did not recognise. In May 2026 the Privacy Commissioner found that both ManageMyHealth and Health NZ breached Rule 5 of the Health Information Privacy Code, the rule on keeping information secure, and said it would issue compliance notices to both. Around 91 percent of the people affected were patients of Northland hospitals. If you were affected, the Commissioner’s office can now consider your complaint. This is not a reason to avoid patient portals, and no service that stores health records online, exora included, is immune to this risk. It is a reason to use two-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
The record you have a right to
For anything the portal and My Health Record do not show, you have a legal route. Under rule 6 of the Health Information Privacy Code 2020, you are entitled to confirmation of whether a health agency holds health information about you, and to access it. That covers your GP, Health New Zealand hospitals, private specialists, physios, pharmacies and dentists.
The procedure comes from the Privacy Act 2020: the provider must respond as soon as reasonably practicable and within 20 working days (section 44). It is usually free. Public providers, including Health New Zealand hospitals, cannot charge unless the Privacy Commissioner has authorised it, and GP practices, as private providers, can charge only in narrow cases, such as a repeat request within 12 months or copies of x-rays and scans. Our New Zealand records guide walks through the request step by step.
No app does the asking for you.
What is planned, and not here yet
In November 2025 the Health Minister announced a 10-year Health Digital Investment Plan, including a single digital medical records system for the whole country. RNZ reported him saying that more than 65 percent of hospitals were still using paper notes (RNZ, 25 November 2025). That is a plan, not a service you can use today.
What a personal health record app is
A personal health record belongs to the patient, not to a provider or the state.
Two properties define it. You fill it in, by uploading documents, connecting a device or typing. And you control access completely: by default nobody else can see any of it, including a doctor treating you, until you choose to share.
Before you put years of documents into any app, ask where the data lives, under whose laws, and what happens if the company shuts down.
The six differences that actually matter
1. Who fills it in
My Health Record is fed from Health New Zealand’s own systems, and your portal by your GP practice, automatically. A personal health record is fed by you: more work, and the reason it can hold things neither of them ever showed you.
2. Who can see it
Your GP record is seen by the clinicians at your practice, and your hospital records by the hospital that treated you. A personal health record is seen by nobody until you share it.
3. A view versus your own copy
The official tools show you records held in someone else’s system. A personal health record holds the actual documents - the photographed letter, the private specialist’s PDF, the scan from 2009 - and, in apps that read them, the information pulled out.
4. How far back it goes
A portal shows what your current practice holds and chooses to share. My Health Record’s immunisations go back to 2005. A personal health record goes as far back as the documents you can lay hands on, including records from before you moved to New Zealand.
5. What you can do with it
Portals are built for reading your GP record and doing GP admin, and the good ones do that well. The better personal health record apps let you search everything, follow a result across different labs over many years, and share a chosen part with a chosen person for a set time.
6. What happens when you move
Change GP and you may lose your portal. Leave New Zealand and My Health Record stays behind. A personal health record goes wherever you go. If you are moving, our guide to moving countries with your medical records covers what to ask for before you leave.
Two situations that make it concrete
You are in a clinic in Bali and the doctor asks what you take
You remember two of your medicines. The dose of the third, and the antibiotic that gave you a rash in 2019, are gone. You can hold up your portal on your phone, if you have a signal and your practice shares your medication list, but the clinic is left with nothing for its file.
With a record of your own, you send a link that shows your medications and allergies and nothing else, set to expire in two days. The doctor opens it in a browser. When you get home, you switch it off.
You are unconscious in an emergency department in Christchurch
Here the health system is the right tool, and nothing on your phone is any use at all. The hospital has its own records, and its staff can contact your GP. No personal health record app solves this, including mine. A locked phone in a bag is not a health record.
Consent runs in opposite directions. Health records held by your providers are available to the clinicians caring for you because that is what makes emergency care safe. A personal health record asks first: access exists only because you created it, for the scope and period you chose. A record built for emergencies cannot stop to ask, and one that asks first cannot be there in an emergency.
And the counterweight, because it belongs here rather than in a footnote: none of this makes your providers careless with your information. Your health records are governed by the Health Information Privacy Code, and you can complain to the Privacy Commissioner. A young private company, mine included, cannot match that kind of institutional accountability, and you should weigh it accordingly.
So do you need both?
For most people, yes, and they complement each other.
Use your GP’s portal for your GP. It is free to view, it fills itself in, and it is where your practice shares results, if it does. Use My Health Record for immunisations, for you and your young children.
Keep your own record for everything else. The hospital letters. The private care. The practice you left. The years overseas. The question “when did this start?” that nobody can answer without reading twelve letters side by side.
The two failure modes are equally common: assuming the portal is your complete record, and assuming clinicians can see your own app. Neither is true.
Where exora fits
exora is a personal health record app, so everything above about the category applies to it. What it adds is the reading. You upload documents, such as PDFs, photos or scans, and exora reads them for you, with a reading system built for medical records. It pulls out the clinical details and builds one searchable record with a timeline. Results from different labs land on one trend line. Every fact links back to the document it came from, so you can check it. You can share a chosen part of your record by link, with an expiry, and revoke it at any time. Your health data is never used to train AI models. exora is free to start, with an optional membership.
Where it does not help, plainly:
- No connection to Health New Zealand. exora has no link to My Health Record, My Health Account, your GP’s portal or any Health New Zealand system. You download documents, or request your records, and upload them yourself.
- Your data is stored in Sydney, Australia. That is outside New Zealand. exora has no New Zealand health-data certification. How we handle data is on our security page; read it before you upload anything.
- Your doctor cannot see it unless you share it. That is the category’s defining property, not a gap we can close.
- It cannot get documents you do not have. The access request is yours to make.
- It can misread. The reading is automated, so check anything that matters against the original. That is why every fact links back to it.
- It is not medical advice. It organises your information. It does not diagnose or tell you what to do.
If you look after other people’s records too, I wrote about managing health records for children, parents and carers in New Zealand. And if you have wondered about asking an AI questions about your records, there is a separate guide to what works here.
A reasonable starting point
If you want one concrete sequence: sign in to My Health Record and download your immunisation history. Open your GP’s portal and see what is actually there. Ask your GP practice for anything missing, and ask any hospital or private clinic that treated you for theirs. Then put it all in one place you control.
The official layer and your own layer answer different questions. It is worth having both.
Sources
- Health New Zealand: My Health Record (what it shows, age, identification levels, linking children)
- Health New Zealand: about My Health Account (digital identity service, 16 and over)
- Health New Zealand: websites and apps
- RNZ: Manage My Health data breach timeline (breach confirmed 31 December 2025, about 125,000 affected, advice to users)
- Privacy Commissioner: Manage My Health and Health NZ breached the Privacy Act (27 May 2026; Rule 5, compliance notices, 91 percent Northland)
- ManageMyHealth: FAQs (practice decides what is shared, viewing is free)
- Health Information Privacy Code 2020, rule 6 (access) and clause 6 (charges)
- Privacy Act 2020, section 44 (20 working days) and sections 66 and 67 (charges by public agencies)
- RNZ: hospitals to move away from paper records (Health Digital Investment Plan)
Claims about My Health Record, My Health Account and access to records are sourced to Health New Zealand, the Privacy Commissioner, the legislation and the portal providers, linked inline, and were checked on 9 November 2026. Health New Zealand’s online services change often; this page will be updated as they do. This article is general information about software and how these systems work, not medical or legal advice.
