We are expanding our HL7 API to enable patients to be added to teams at any time. This will work for any organisation regardless of the organisation that created the patient’s record originally (our APIs had previously only supported adding patients to a team when creating their records). Institutions will be able to add patients to teams by adding the alias for the appropriate team(s) in the ZTM segment of A28 & A31 messages.
This change is built on implied consent. In other words, PKB interprets the HL7 message from a verified clinical institution as meaning the team is providing direct care to the patient and so should have the default privacy labels access the team had configured, e.g. no access for the typical Patient Record Teams of organisations.
PKB notifies the registered patient and their carers that the patient is now in the team. As usual, the patient can change the sharing at any time in the Sharing tab.
This is a key part of the clinical transformation workstream. Every time an organisation sets up a new team they must populate the ZTM segment of relevant HL7 messages to link patients to this team. This means the team no longer needs to maintain a list of the patients they are treating as PKB will have the accurate list automatically. The team can focus on adding care plans to each patient’s record in the clinic and responding to messages from the patients outside of the clinic.
This will allow patients to get immediate access to the team’s resources, including library links, care plan templates, consultation questionnaires and messaging contacts.
This change also gives institutions more accurate statistics across and within institutions. In the past, a patient receiving HL7 data from multiple institutions would only have appeared in the statistics of the institution that created the patient’s record. Now the patient will automatically appear in all. In the past patients only appeared in a team’s statistics when a team had manually added the patients. Now patients will be added automatically.
We will eventually expand this functionality so that teams can add patients outside of their organisation network via both the user interface and the bulk upload process using CSV files We have not scheduled a date for this, it depends on what % of patients end up being covered by the HL7 feeds of customers vs the other routes.
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