Development Update – July 2023

Welcome to July’s instalment of our development blog. This month we’re including features that we have recently released and those that are coming up in July. 

Recently released

NHS login age restriction

Patients can only register for PKB via NHS login if they are at least 16 years old. This age limit has been increased from 13 to 16 based on feedback from clinical teams that work with paediatric patients. Patients under 16 can still register for PKB if invited by a professional or coordinator. You can read more about paediatric records in our manual. 

Changes to the FHIR Send Questionnaire API

We have added new features to the FHIR API endpoints, which will improve customer workflows built for sending questionnaires and retrieving responses: 

• Send-questionnaire-request: organisations can send questionnaires to any patient in their organisation, even if they are not in the team that is sending the questionnaire. 
• QuestionnaireResponse: The new ‘based-on’ parameter allows customers to search for a questionnaire response matching a procedure request identifier that was specified when the questionnaire was sent.
• Questionnaire: Organisations can search for templates belonging to specific teams using the publisher-reference search parameter. 

We are introducing new advanced questionnaires in Autumn 2023. Read more about the upcoming changes on our dev wiki. 

Mass consultations are now sent to all patients in the team

When a professional or coordinator sends a mass consultation to their team, it will now be sent to all patients. This means that when patients who aren’t registered complete registration, the consultation will be waiting for them in the ‘Events & messages’ section of their record.  

Patient data deletion for Medmij in Netherlands

Patients in the Netherlands are able to request data from their care providers via an integration with the MedMij platform. Patients and their carers can now delete data that they requested be added to their records via the MedMij integration. We have made this change as it is required for us to remain compliant with the MedMij Framework.  

Updated Lab Tests Online links for Tests

We have updated the ‘Common questions and more information’ links for tests on the Tests page to take patients to the correct Lab Tests Online webpage, as they recently modified their website URLs. These links let patients learn more about their tests from a trustworthy source.

Email notifications improvements

We’ve made two changes to our email notifications: 

• We won’t send email notifications about updates made in a patient’s profile if the changes to a field were only updates to casing or spacing.
• We have updated the text in the email notification that patients get when they have been discharged from a team to make it clearer what has happened.

Freeze record functionality for adults

Professionals can now temporarily block access to a patient’s record using the ‘Freeze Record’ feature, regardless of their age. Previously, only records belonging to patients under 18 years old could be frozen by professionals.
While frozen, the patient cannot log into their record and carers and individual professionals cannot view the patient’s record. Patients that are logged in when their record is frozen will be automatically logged out. Institutional professionals can still log in as part of care delivery. 
You can read about this feature in our manual. 

Upcoming releases in July

FHIR API: Medicines and conditions available in our user interface

‘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.We will display medicines and conditions held in our FHIR store on the Medicines and Conditions pages. This means organisations can send appointments, medications and conditions via our FHIR APIs and view them in our user interface. We will continue this process for other data types, starting with observations.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 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.

New symptoms

We have added the following symptoms to PKB:

• Oedema (Fluid retention) 
• Flatulence 
• Acute back pain with sciatica 
• Back pain 

Patients can add these symptoms to their record on the Symptoms page.

We fix bugs on an ongoing basis, alongside our work on new features. To see the list of bugs that we have fixed recently, please read our release notes.