Welcome to October’s instalment of our development blog. New work this month includes:
- New welcome screens for patients
- Adding the “Get my data” button on the homepage for users in the Netherlands
- Update to emails sent to patients and carers when they are added to a team
- Allowing measurements to be deleted via our REST API for our integration with OMRON
- Allowing professionals to trigger care plan exports
New welcome screens for patients
We have re-designed the patient welcome screens, which include a walkthrough of consent. The aim is to help patients better understand privacy in their record and how they can control what their teams can see.
We will do this by simplifying the text on these pages to make it clear to the patient how they can change what they share with teams. We will be adding progress indicators to show the patient which part of the process they are in and ensuring all these pages meet accessibility standards. We will publish a separate blog post about this with more details soon.

‘Update my record’ button on the homepage for users in the Netherlands
The ‘Get my data’ button will be renamed to ‘Update my record’ and will be shown as ‘Update mijn dossier’ in Dutch.
This button will be moved from the Sharing page to the main homepage for all users in the Netherlands so that it is easy to find. When a user clicks on the ‘Update my record’ button, they can choose which caregivers’ data to receive in their PKB record.
MedMij is the standard in the Netherlands for the secure exchange of health data between care users and care providers. By complying with MedMij’s criteria, CarePoint, our Dutch partner, provides full PGO (Dutch patient-health record) functionality to allow patients to request copies of their data from Dutch providers. These data are then added to the patients’ PKB records. You can read more about the MedMij work in our deploy wiki.

Updates to email sent to patients and carers when they are added to a team
Based on patient feedback, we will be updating the content of the email sent to patients and carers when a patient is added to a new team. The emails will now include a list of common questions and answers that will provide our users with more information to help them understand what being added to a team means for them.
Delete measurements via our REST API
An endpoint will be added which will allow measurements to be deleted via our proprietary REST -API. This will be used initially by our partners, OMRON.
OMRON are currently working on an integration between their devices and PKB to allow the addition of measurements such as pulse and blood pressure to a patient’s PKB record. If these measurements are added to or deleted from the patient’s OMRON Connect app these changes will be reflected in their PKB record.
Adding the care plan export feature for professionals
A professional will now be able to export care plan data for patients in their team. This change was requested by customers and means professionals no longer need to rely on coordinators to export care plan data for them. You can read how to export care plan data as a professional here.

Continued work from September
- We have resumed processing data from the EMIS extract service for GP practices that have an active sharing agreement in EMIS Web. This means that records are being created and populated with diagnoses, allergies and medications. We are currently working through historical data and hope to be up-to-date and processing daily updates later this month.
- We are continuing work on updates to the Add tests and Add symptoms pages as mentioned in the August & September development blogs. This is to improve the usability of our system.
September review
In September, we made some changes that were not included in our September blog. These are detailed below:
- We made the following updates to Tests. Please review our developer documentation for more information.
- We have updated the ‘correction date’ shown on individual laboratory results when an amendment has been sent for an existing result. Previously, this date was the date the result was processed by PKB but has now been updated to be the date the correction was sent. Systolic blood pressure and diastolic blood pressure can now be sent individually via a HL7 ORU^R01 message and will be displayed alongside other blood pressure readings on the ‘Blood pressure’ graph in the Measurements section. We are now displaying the reference range in the summary section for individual test results when this is provided in the OBX-7 field of textual laboratory reports to provide greater consistency across our system. Previously this value was accepted and stored but not displayed.
- Any comments included in an HL7 laboratory result message are now displayed in a monospace font to preserve any space-based formatting.
- We have updated the help text on the ‘Add symptoms’ page for patients so that it is clearer that they should contact services directly if they have immediate concerns about their symptoms. The message now reads ‘Your professionals will not automatically see new information. If you have immediate concerns about your health it is important that you contact them directly. If it is an emergency please contact emergency services.’
- We have changed the behaviour for users who click ‘Send message’ when they have no contacts to message so it is clearer to users that they can’t send a message at this stage. We will no longer show the messaging fields and will put the following warning message on the page “This feature allows you to send messages to the health and social care professionals or carers that you share your record with. You are not currently sharing your record with anyone who has messaging enabled and are therefore unable to send a message.“
- We added annotations to the endpoint, input parameters, and output response model of the REST API when accessed via Swagger to improve the documentation.
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