Development Update – February 2023

Welcome to February’s instalment of our development blog. We are happy to share the features that we are releasing this month. 

New test results will appear in the notifications panel

Patients will see the value of their latest test results in the notifications panel. They no longer need to navigate from the notification to see the value. They can click the notification to see more information and previous test results. 

We prioritised this based on feedback from patients receiving kidney care. Their latest set of test results gives them vital information when managing their health, so it’s essential for them to find these results easily. You can read about other changes that we plan to make to Tests, based on their feedback, in our April 2022 blog post.

FHIR API: Appointments available in our user interface

FHIR is the global industry standard for passing healthcare data between systems. Last year, we worked on end-to-end FHIR support for appointments. This month, we will display FHIR appointments on the Appointments page. 

We’re now working on the display of conditions (diagnoses) and medications and expect these to be available in March. We have learned a lot by working on appointments and this is helping us to migrate these other data types to FHIR more efficiently. 

In parallel, we’re working on implementing industry standard OAuth so that organisations and third-party applications can read data from our FHIR API. Access rights depend on appropriate authorisation, including privacy labels consent.

You can read more about our FHIR development work on our roadmap wiki page. Each customer can already write clinical data to PKB’s data store in either STU3 or R4 versions of FHIR.  FHIR specifications are available on our developer wiki. 

FHIR API: Updates to the send-questionnaire-request 

The send-questionnaire-request FHIR API allows organisations to send questionnaires to patients from their local EHRs. Organisations will be able to:

1. Decide whether professionals receive email notifications when patients respond to questionnaires. 
2. Send questionnaires to patients using their national identifiers (eg NHS numbers), rather than just with a PKB ID. 
3. Send questionnaires to patients who are not registered; have been discharged from a team; or have sharing disabled. This will bring the functionality in line with sending questionnaires from the PKB website.

HL7 API: Record matching using email address

Email address can be used as an identifier in an HL7 message to update a patient’s PKB record. This change will allow organisations in countries that do not have a suitable national ID to send data into PKB using our HL7 API and will initially be used by organisations in the Netherlands. 

New symptoms and measurements 

We are adding symptoms and measurements that clinical teams and patients have requested. These include:

• Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) symptoms so that patients in the Bedford IBD team can track their symptoms in a patient-initiated follow-up (PIFU) care plan.
• ‘Steps’ as a ‘single supported measurement’. Third-party applications, like Current Health, will send step counts into PKB via the HL7 API and they will be used by patients who are being monitored at home by their clinical teams. 

Performance improvements

Our developers have completed a project to simplify our application code. This will accelerate development and improve our system performance. For example, the Tests page now loads faster. The longest loading times were reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds and the average from 1.5 seconds to 1 second.