Welcome to April’s instalment of our development blog. The highlights are:
- New ‘View Appointment’ page design.
- Clearer email notifications about allergies, diagnoses and medications for patients.
New ‘View appointment’ page
We are refreshing the ‘View appointment’ page. The new page will:
- Highlight important details like location, date and time.
- Link to other information to help patients prepare for and get the most out of their appointments, for example symptom tracking or care plans.
- Meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. You can read more about our work on accessibility in our latest blog post.
- Have a clear layout for all screen sizes.
Email notifications about allergies, diagnoses and medications will be clearer for patients
Our email notifications will say if an organisation added allergies, diagnoses or medications to a patient’s record and include a link to that specific page in their record. Currently, the email notifications about data from HL7 A28 or A31 messages only links to the patient’s demographics profile page, even if the message also contains allergies, diagnoses or medications.
Northern Ireland Health and Care number support in England
We will now show a patient’s Health and Care (H&C) number in the patient banner to professionals using Patients Know Best in England. The text will say ‘NHS (H&C) number’ because H&C numbers are valid NHS numbers.
A H&C number identifies a patient within the NHS in Northern Ireland. Patients with a H&C number use this as their national identifier when they go to a doctor in England.
New symptoms
The symptoms list will have the following new symptoms, so patients in Rheumatology, Haemochromatosis and Lynch Syndrome teams can track them:
- Swelling of the wrists
- Swelling of the elbow
- Swelling of the shoulder
- Swelling of the knee
- Swelling of the ankle
- Joint swelling (generally)
- Abdominal swelling
- Increased thirst
- Increased urine output
- Impotence
- Early menopause
- Inability to swallow food
- Indigestion
We are supporting customers using Patients Know Best to roll out Patient Initiated Follow-Up (PIFU). These symptoms are being added for patients to track on self-monitoring pathways.
Changing the banner colour in NHS App
The banner, shown at the top of the screen when using Patients Know Best from the NHS App, will change from yellow to grey. This is in line with NHS App guidance. The banner reminds the patient that Patients Know Best is used by their hospital or GP. We continue to work closely with the NHS App team so that it’s easy to use Patients Know Best in the NHS App.
March review:
In March, we made the following change that wasn’t covered in our blog:
- Our /v2-beta/tests/results REST API endpoint now returns additional information:
- labOrderId
- sourceType
- sourceEnteredBy
- sourcePersonId
- sourceRoute
This information will be used by CMyLife the Netherlands. The aim of CMyLife is to support and improve the quality of care for people with blood cancer. Their platform for patients pulls test results from Patients Know Best and patients can view and update their results from there.