Welcome to February’s instalment of our upcoming development blog. This month we are focusing on:
- Continuing work to restart the EMIS extract service
- Allowing patients to report errors opening documents
- Improving the patient registration process
- Allowing customers to pull consultation responses from PKB using our FHIR APIs
National Identifier changes
This month, we will be changing the way PKB handles National Identifiers for patients in the United Kingdom.
There are three types of National Identifiers available in the UK:
- National Health Service (NHS) number for patients in England, Wales and the Isle of Man.
- Community Health Index (CHI) number for patients in Scotland
- Health and Care (H&C) number for patients in Northern Ireland
Currently, the type of National Identifier needs to be specified when sending data via an integration for it to be accepted. Additionally, it is only possible to add one type of National Identifier for patients via the user interface (which is the identifier associated with the team’s country, so for example, teams in England can only add NHS numbers to their patients’ records).
This month, we will be changing this so the system can correctly determine the National Identifier type of a number (by seeing which validation rules it meets), without the type being specified or matching the type expected for the country the team is in. This will make it easier to add patients to the team who have national identifiers from a different country to the team’s country.
This change is a result of the ongoing work to restart the EMIS Extract Service. Previously, EMIS would send us some National Identifiers that were CHI or H&C numbers, but we had to reject these IDs as they were being sent by GP practices based in England.
Restarting EMIS extract service
As well as the work to change how we handle National Identifiers (detailed above), we are also continuing the other tasks needed for us to restart the EMIS extract service.
This month we will continue updating our sensitive code list to use SNOMED CT codes and running performance tests.
We will also be configuring some more GP practices to send us data. This means when the EMIS extract service is restarted, all configured practices with active sharing agreements in EMIS Web will be creating and updating patient records in PKB.
Document reporting
In the ‘Events & messages’ section of PKB, PDF documents that are sent to patients via HL7 integration will have a report button next to them. If a patient cannot access the document from any of their devices, they can report an error with the document by clicking on this button.
Organisations can use our FHIR API read receipt query to check the read status of their documents.
If an organisation sent its planned print date for the document (in the HL7 MDM T02 message) and the document is reported before the print date, the patient will see a message telling them the document will be posted to them.
Limit on the number of times a date of birth can be entered during identify verification
This month we are adding a restriction to the number of attempts a user can make when entering their date of birth to verify identity while registering.
When a user is completing registration they will be locked out for a short period of time if they incorrectly enter the date of birth after multiple attempts.
Updated text on registration pages
We are adding the following disclaimer text to the registration pages for patients or carers:
‘It is a legal offence to use someone else’s personal details to gain access to their health records. If you have received an invitation in error, please delete it.’
Continued work from January
We are planning to release the following features in February, please read our January blog for more information about them:
- FHIR API – Questionnaire Responses
- HL7 API – Add email address to register patient with existing record
- Updating plans with tracking
January Review
The following changes were made in January but were not covered in a blog:
NHS login warning message
We have updated the warning message shown to users trying to log into PKB in or register with their NHS login when they do not have an existing record in our system. The message no longer advises the patient to contact their GP practice, instead the new message reads:
‘If the team involved in your care are using Patients Know Best, they may invite you to join. You can currently only use Patients Know Best if you’re invited by your NHS provider organisation. To find out if your healthcare team is using Patients Know Best, please email help@patientsknowbest.com.’
Measurements
We added 5 new measurements; ‘Seizure Type 1 (daily count)’, ‘Seizure Type 2 (daily count)’, ‘Seizure Type 3 (daily count)’, ‘Seizure Type 4 (daily count)’ and ‘Doses of rescue medication given in a day (count)’. These can be used to track seizures where the seizure type is specified according to the patient’s seizure history.
That’s it for this month. We will be back in March with more updates on what we are working on. In the meantime, if you have any questions please get in touch.