Development Update – September 2023

Welcome to September’s instalment of our development blog. We are excited to share the features that we are working on this month. 

Advanced Questionnaires FHIR APIs

Organisations will be able to use the new FHIR API endpoints to send Advanced Questionnaires to patients and retrieve their responses. This is the first stage of the Advanced Questionnaires roll-out and will allow organisations to use the following endpoints:

• $send-questionnaire-request, to trigger questionnaire requests 
• Questionnaire, to retrieve Questionnaire resources 
• QuestionnaireResponse, to retrieve QuestionnaireResponse resources 

Advanced feature include: scoring, branching and coding. You can read more about how to use these new endpoints in our dev wiki. 

The next phase of work will be to allow patients to view their responses in the main PKB record; users to trigger Advanced Questionnaires via the UI; and export responses via the UI.

Unregistered users now receive email notifications for new Plans 

Unregistered patients with an email address in their record will now receive an email notification when a Plan is added to their record. Previously, only registered patients received these email notifications. 

This change will benefit clinical teams using Plans to carry out pre-operative assessments, as unregistered patients will now be notified and can register to complete the assessment. This allows clinical teams to access many more patients, in contexts such as pre-operative assessment, via PKB Plans. 

Registration tokens are now only for patients over 16

PKB’s token registration APIs will no longer return registration tokens for patients under the age of 16. For Trusts that use registration tokens to send invitation letters to patients, these changes mean that patients under 16 will not be sent invitation letters. 

This is the latest in a series of changes relating to inviting paediatric patients to register. A Professional or Coordinator must now invite the patient to register via email, the young patient cannot register via NHS login or token. You can read more about paediatric records in our manual.  

Moving to EMIS ES with IM1 

PKB is now signed off under the IM1 programme for the EMIS Patient Data Extract Service. This transition from the EMIS partner programme to the IM1 programme required detailed documentation to be provided in a Supplier Conformance Assessment List (SCAL) and witness testing, which was overseen by both EMIS and NHS England. No functional changes have been made to the data or the service as part of this transition.

Update to the NHS login button 

Patients will see the new ‘Continue to NHS login’ button on PKB login pages. Previously, there were separate buttons for logging in and registering via NHS login, but this has now been changed so that patients can either log in or register by clicking the same button, making it easier to access their PKB record using NHS login. 

This button will appear on the main PKB login page, self-registration pages and custom login pages.

More improvements  to the Test Results page 

Last month, we updated how Test Results are displayed in PKB after working with users to find out how they would get the most out of their test results. We have now completed additional changes to the Test Results display to include: 

• Links to Lab Tests Online that can be accessed from the table 
• Whether the test result has increased or decreased since the last result 
• New icons to indicate whether the result is in range or out of range 

The updated Test Results page contains a tabular view with recent test results at the top. This table displays the result, the change from the previous result and, if sent, the reference range. Patients can still click on each test result and see trends over time. 

We enjoyed working with users on this redesign and have already received positive feedback. We look forward to working with users on future development. To read more about and sign up for user research, click here.