Welcome to March’s instalment of our development blog. We are excited to share the features that we are releasing this month.
Patients can manage their appointments in DrDoctor
Patients can now manage their appointments in DrDoctor from their PKB record. If an organisation enables this integration, patients can click through from the PKB appointment to their DrDoctor portal and cancel or change their appointment. PKB hands over the patient’s NHS login session to DrDoctor so the patient does not need to log in again.
Setting this up is simple. An organisation asks DrDoctor to include an appointment management URL in the appointment (HL7 SIU) message that DrDoctor sends to PKB. Contact your PKB Project Manager if your organisation is using DrDoctor and you’d like to enable this integration.
PKB can extend this integration to work with other appointment management partners. The documentation is in our developer wiki. Contact our Partnerships Team to learn more.
HL7 API: Remove patients from teams
Organisations will be able to discharge patients from clinical teams using the HL7 API. Previously this was only possible in the user interface. This lets organisations discharge patients automatically, for example when a patient changes their GP practice. When a patient is discharged from a team, they will receive an email notification and the team will lose access to data in the patient’s record that was not added by that team.
The specification is available in our developer wiki.
Renaming diagnoses to conditions
‘Diagnoses’ will be renamed to ‘Conditions’ in PKB. This change will bring the terminology used in PKB in line with other systems, as well as with the FHIR standard.
FHIR API: Medicines and conditions available in our user interface
This month, we will display medicines and conditions held in our FHIR store on the Medicines and Conditions pages.
FHIR is the global industry standard for passing healthcare data between systems. You can read more about our ongoing 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.
Changes to the symptoms chart
The chart on the Symptoms screen will now display the highest severity that a patient recorded for a symptom each day, rather than the average severity. This will ensure that clinicians can always see a patient’s most severe symptoms.
