Welcome to November’s instalment of our development blog. This month we’re continuing to make it easier for users to add data to their record by updating the ‘Add medicines’ page and making further improvements to the ‘Add symptoms’ and ‘Add tests’ pages.
PKB is working to provide a fully-functional bidirectional FHIR API. The Patient resource can now be used to create patients’ records and to invite them to register by email. Additionally, this month our Questionnaire Response API that allows customers to retrieve questionnaire responses will be updated to include the team name making it easier for organisations to route answers to teams.
New ‘Add medicines’ page
We will be updating the layout of the ‘Add medicines’ page to simplify the process of adding medicines via the user interface. Many patients like to keep a list of their medications in their record so improving the experience is a priority for us.
These updates include changing the overall page layout and dividing the form into distinct sections to make it clearer. We will also include the ability to add attachments to align with the professional’s functionality and the new ‘Add medicines’ form will enable users to add multiple medicines at once.
Following feedback from users, we will also be making the start date for medicines optional for users who might not remember the start date.
We have recently applied a similar update to the Tests and Measurements pages and will be applying an update to the Symptoms page early this month. More information can be found about this in our September blog.
Further updates to the ‘Add measurements’ & ‘Add tests’ pages
Previously, when viewing a specific measurement page, if the user clicked on ‘Add measurement’, they were only given the option to add the specific type of measurement they were viewing.
We will be changing the behaviour on both the ‘Add measurement’ and ‘Add test result’ pages. When a user views a page for a specific measurement or test result , and clicks to add data, they will still be taken to the form with the specific item pre-selected. But the user will have both the option to remove that default item from the list and to add other items. We are making these changes based on feedback from users. Users found previous limitations cumbersome as it meant they had to return to the main measurements page to add alternative measurements.
FHIR API to create records and register patients
The Patient resource for FHIR STU3 can now be used to create patients’ records and send demographics data, including email addresses. When PKB receives the email address for a patient it sends an email message inviting the patient to register. This is a fast way to register patients using email addresses from NHS England’s Spine for example.
The FHIR QuestionnaireResponse endpoint will now return the team’s name and id
We are adding the team id and team name to the response of the FHIR QuestionnaireResponse endpoint. Since different teams might use the same questionnaire with their patients, this will allow customers to determine which team each consultation response belongs to.
This will initially be used by one of our customers to integrate PAM questionnaire answers with their EPR system (Cerner). These additional fields will help with triaging to the correct team and in turn to the correct clinician.
Patients will be given their documents’ planned postal date when reporting an issue
If a planned postal date has been sent with a document and a patient reports that they had problems viewing their document in PKB, we will now tell them if the document will be posted or if they need to contact their organisation. This is to give patients better visibility of their communication and how they are best to access this if they have any issues. This will only be possible if the organisation that sends the document includes a planned postal date. See our HL7 specification for more details about how to send this.
NHS login error message
For users logging in or registering with NHS login, we will be adding a more granular error message if the NHS login authorisation process fails due to the NHS login details matching multiple records.
Continued work from October
We are continuing to work on the following projects this month. You can read more about them in our September and October blogs
- Patients will receive notifications from PKB in the NHS App.
- ‘Update my record’ button on the homepage for users in the Netherlands
- The dropdown menu that professional or coordinators use to change between teams will include the organisation name
October review
In October, we made some changes that were not included in our October blog. These are detailed below:
- We have improved the performance of the patient search for coordinators and professionals when the search criteria includes a name or date-of-birth.
- We have implemented a new custom login page for The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals Trust.
- We have changed the behaviour of HL7 demographic updates so that if an HL7 ‘Null Value’ is assigned to a high preference phone number type (e.g. PRS) and a phone number is provided for a lower preference phone number type, we will ignore the higher preference number as it has a null value.