Welcome to April’s instalment of our development update, where we give you an insight into what our Engineering team is working on this month. This month, we are focusing on:
- Allowing patients to create their own records using NHS Login and improving our registration forms.
- Continuing work on restarting the EMIS extract service.
NHS Login
We will be adding the ‘Log in with NHS login’ button to our main login page so this will be available for all patients. For more information on our integration with NHS login, please see our manual.

We are also working on allowing users without a PKB record to create one using NHS login to verify their identity. Whether the patient chooses to register from within the NHS App or from the PKB website, they will create a PKB account.
If the patient has chosen to register from a custom login page for a specific team, we will add an option on the registration form to ask the patient whether they are a patient of that organisation, and if they are, we will link their record to that organisation.

Registration
Over the next couple of months, we will be making registering for PKB easier.
We will make sure registration forms:
- include fields for address and gender
- are more accessible
- have clearer mandatory vs optional fields
Previously we marked mandatory fields with an asterisk(*) and did not mark optional fields in any way. We have decided to change this and mention optional fields only.
We decided on this for multiple reasons:
- Research shows that the asterisk is not obvious to everyone and can lead to uncertainty
- There are more fields on our UI that are mandatory than optional
- Fewer distractions on any form makes it more readable

New time field for monitoring in care plans
We are adding a time field in the monitoring section of plans that tracks tests, measurements and symptoms. This allows time to be recorded with data, which can be critical for interpreting the results entered for some conditions, e.g. blood glucose levels.

New measurements
We are adding three new measurements: ‘Nine-Hole Peg Test’, ‘Timed 25ft Walk’ and ‘Number of missed medications today’

New symptoms
We are adding three new symptoms: ‘Stress’, ‘Flicker (photosensitivity)’ and ‘Generally unwell’.

Continued work from March
We will continue to work on the following features in April. Please see our previous blogs for more information:
- Planned postal time for documents
- Restarting EMIS extract service
- Changes to how we handle national identifiers
We’ll be back in May with more updates on the improvements we’re making for you. In the meantime, if you have any feedback we’d love to hear from you.
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