Welcome to February’s instalment of our development blog. The highlights this month are:
- Notifications from PKB in the NHS App.
- Updating our Privacy Notice.
- Adding a data source for questionnaire responses.
- Moving to the new EMIS EXA feed.
Patients will receive notifications from PKB in the NHS App
Patients will receive native smartphone notifications from the NHS App when there are new messages for them in PKB. NHS App plan to switch on these notifications this month. Patients will receive these notifications for new activity in the Events & messages section, including encounters and consultations.
The user can read their message from within the NHS App by clicking on the app, instead of email notifications.
These email notifications already work well. 79% of patients receiving documents in PKB click their email notifications to read their letters, with 89% of these patients doing so within 48 hours. This upgrade will make responding to a notification even more convenient for patients.
Updated Privacy Notice
The User Agreement and Privacy Notice (formerly Privacy Policy) have been updated on the registration pages to reflect the most up-to-date Information Governance model. This is a result of our collaboration with NHSX.
We have also embedded a video (see below) within the Privacy Notice to help users understand what this means to them.
For more information about the latest User Agreement and Privacy Notice please see https://manual.patientsknowbest.com/legal/user-agreement and https://manual.patientsknowbest.com/legal/privacy.
FHIR QuestionnaireResponse API will return the source of the response
We are adding the data source to consultation responses that are pulled by customers via the API.
This means that it will be clear which user (patient or carer) completed the questionnaire. Customers use response information to trigger events in other systems.
Migrating to the new EMIS Extract Service
Our team is continuing work on moving from the legacy EMIS Patient Data Extract Service to the new EMIS Partner Bulk Extract Service, EXA. The legacy system was taken offline at the end of January so the move to “EXA” will allow us to resume pulling through allergies, medications and diagnoses from EMIS.
A new graph showing record creation in the Registration Report
The Registration Report now includes a graph to show record creation over the last 28 days. This gives organisations an indication of the number of new records that have been created in their organisation.
Continued work from January:
- Carers will lose access to a child’s record at 13, 16 and 18 years, unless one of their clinical team intervenes. This is to bring PKB’s behaviour in line with relevant legislation, which states that children and young adults can assume control over their personal information and restrict access to it at the age of 13. We described this change in more detail in our recent blog post.
- Teams will be able to mark questions as mandatory when creating consultations, so patients must answer them before submitting. This will allow teams to ensure patients answer the most important questions, preventing the need to assess and re-send them.
- The Data in Records report described last month will be available for customers.
January review
In January, we made the following changes that weren’t covered in our January blog:
- We made some minor tweaks to the colours used for interactive elements and text so that they meet the latest standards as listed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). The PKB manual has more information about WAG and PKB’s accessibility.
- Since January, a professional can add a registered patient via the UI and the patient will appear in the patient list immediately. Previously, the professional had to wait for the patient to accept their email invitation. This brings the UI functionality in line with adding patients via HL7. Registered patients are automatically added to patient lists because verified clinical institutions providing direct care to patients have implicit consent to add patients to their team with the team’s default privacy label.