Welcome to July’s installment of our upcoming development blog. This month we are making improvements to our email notifications and user interface, and adding more integration options.
Our development work this month includes:
- Reducing the number of email notifications sent to patients about demographic changes and historical data
- Improving the measurements display on graphs
- Adding the option to register using NHS login for patients registering with codes
- Allowing customers to embed PKB in their local systems
Notifications
PKB will throttle email notifications about historical data and demographic updates
In response to feedback from patients, we will be reducing the number of email notifications patients receive about demographic updates, past appointments and documents older than a week.
Patients will receive:
- One notification a day for updates to their demographic details
- No notifications about documents where the document date is older than one week. This will be specifically for documents sent via our HL7 MDM T02 API
- No email notifications will be sent for appointments which are in the past
User interface
Measurements display improvements
We will be improving the way we handle certain measurements so that they are displayed as daily totals on graphs. We will only be doing this for measurements that are intended to be tracked as daily totals, such as alcohol intake per day, step counts or time spent sleeping. This will make graphs for these measurements easier to interpret.
Option to use NHS login on registration pages
Patients who have received codes to register via text message, letter or email can choose to register using NHS login if they prefer. We will be adding a button to register using NHS login on the registration pages so patients that either have expired codes or who would simply rather register with NHS login have the option to do so.
Advanced consent questions can be configured to list a team’s research partners and include a link to more information
A team can ask their patients for their consent to be contacted about research using the advanced consent questions. We will soon allow a team to include their research partners and a link to more information in the advanced consent questions. This means that any additional information the team would like the patient to review about their research is easily accessible. The team coordinator will be able to set this up from the Institutions tab.
Team coordinator view
Integrations
PKB can be embedded into local systems
Customers will soon be able to embed PKB in an iframe within their local systems.
When combined with PKB’s single sign-on functionality, users can move seamlessly into PKB records from within their own systems, eliminating the need to log into PKB in a separate browser.
The first customers to use this will be Servelec. They will use PKB’s single sign-on API to launch PKB patient records from within their social care case management system, Mosaic.
This is the next phase of the NHS Digital Pathfinders project, which aims to encourage collaboration between health care and social care settings. The first phase of this project went live earlier this year, when PKB began displaying social care data from Mosaic within PKB.
Other customers who are interested in displaying PKB within an iframe should discuss this with their Success team member who can advise them of next steps.
Partners will be able to send HL7 messages on behalf of organisations that aren’t PKB organisations
It will soon be possible for an organisation to send data to patient records on behalf of organisations that aren’t PKB customers. The sending organisation can include a label with the data to indicate which organisation they are sending the data on behalf of and this will be displayed in the user interface.
This functionality is useful where a central organisation is sending data on behalf of its partner organisations, particularly where there are a large number of partners that won’t be set up as PKB organisations.
Continued work from June
The following work is continuing from June. Please read our June blog for more information about these features.
- Library improvements
- Show/hide password option on password field
- Restarting the EMIS extract service
June review
In June, we made some changes to the system that were not included in our June blog. These are detailed below
New symptoms
We added new symptoms frequently used by multiple sclerosis patients so that these can be tracked within PKB. The new symptoms available are:
- Exercise intolerance
- Sensitivity to temperature
- Bowel problems
- Bladder problems
- Sexual problems
- Impaired speech
- Involuntary crying/emotions
- Vertigo
- Sleep disorders
- Cognitive impairment
- Pain in eye
- Unstable vision
- Muscle spasms
- Clumsiness
New document types
We added support for 4 new document types, which can be sent via HL7 in a MDM T02 message. These will display in the Events & messages section of a patient’s record. The new document types are:
- Health screening report
- Timetable
- Signposting document
- Support document