Development update – August 2021

Welcome to August’s installment of our upcoming development blog. New work this month includes: 

• Making it easier for users to add test results
• Expanding our social care data integration with Mosaic to patients in Brent

New ‘Add tests’ page

Following a redesign session with patients, we will be updating the layout of the ‘Add tests’ page to simplify the process of adding test results via the user interface.  We will add a search function for both individual tests and panels of tests. The new ‘Add tests’ form will also enable users to add multiple tests at once and will no longer restrict the user to only adding results from a particular panel at one time. 

New health authority going live with Social Care data

This month, Brent council will make their social care data available to be displayed in PKB, as part of the Pathfinder’s project that went live earlier this year. 

Brent council is the third council to make this data available, joining Westminster City Council and Hammersmith & Fulham. 

Users of PKB who receive social care from Brent council, will now be able to see the following data in the ‘Social Care’ page in PKB: 

• Social workers – this includes the names and contact details of a patient’s social worker
• Care package services – this includes the type of care packages the patient is receiving as well as the times, locations and frequency of these services
• Assessments – this includes the names of assessments and the dates they were completed
• Case notes – this includes the date the notes were completed and the date they are effective from 
• Current communication needs – this includes information about additional support the user may need for communication 

This data is taken from the council’s social care management system, Mosaic. 

Additionally, Servelec is currently working to make PKB accessible for social care staff in the Mosaic system. This is possible due to the development work we did last month, to allow PKB to be embedded in an iframe. 

New symptoms

We are adding two new symptoms to our symptoms list: ‘Hand pain’ and ‘Foot pain’. These symptoms were requested by a colorectal service so that they can monitor the pain of hands and feet for their patients who are undergoing chemotherapy treatment. They can be added directly via the ‘Symptoms’ page or via a Care Plan.

Continued work from July

The following work is continuing from July. Please read our July blog for more information about these features: 

• Advanced consent questions can be configured to list a team’s research partners and include a link to more information.
• Library improvements: Currently, we are fixing bugs.  At a later date, we’ll work on the user interface changes. 
• Measurements display improvements.
• Restarting the EMIS extract service.

July review

In July, we made some changes to the system that were not included in our July blog. These are detailed below:

1. Radiology reports can now be sent as PDF documents. Please see our developer documentation for further information.
2. We have renamed the ‘Guests’ field shown on appointment details to ‘Attendees’. This more accurately reflects the purpose of the field.

That’s it! We look forward to sharing details about more new features and updates next month. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more please get in touch.