Background

Personal demographic information held on PDS is subject to change. As a result, services can hold incorrect or out of date demographic information for patients, which can cause problems when trying to communicate with them, for example, a patient may change address but a service caring for them may not be aware until they have carried out a patient trace via PDS.  

The PDS Record Change event will notify subscribing organisations pro-actively when a patient’s demographic information has changed on PDS, allowing them to perform a PDS synchronisation and consume any details they require from the PDS record.

By ensuring there are digital tools and services available to access, we will empower patients to access information and services directly and participate in their own healthcare.

We will enable the health and care system to personalise patient's experience to meet their needs, improve health outcomes through timely interventions, and by enabling more effective interactions across care settings 

Enabling patients to set contact preferences and ensure that these are used by all health and care organisations and systems, the request will allow patients to take control of their own information so that information they update online will also be available to their GP practice and other PDS connect system. 

It is also in support of the legal commitments for NHS organisations under GDPR to ensure “information is accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date”. 

Outline Plan

• Providers to complete development of the changes within 3 months of the roadmap publication date
• DHSC/BSA/NHSD to complete planning to roll-out the changes across the respective Provider estates, expected full roll-outs to complete no later than 27th September
• Providers confirm deployment of changes with NHSD
• NHSD deploy new feature to enable users to update their contact details (email and mobile).

Summary of Change

The PDS Record Change Event has been developed as a lightweight event message to inform a subscriber that a PDS record has changed, so that they can synchronise their local patient record with PDS and perform any actions they need to do based on the elements that have changed. The potential consumers of this event would be any organisation which has a PDS integration either full, SMSP or another method. 

As the PDS Record Change event is published for all changes to the PDS record, the subscribing system will need to decide what actions should be taken, based on each of the elements that are found to have change as part of the PDS synchronisation process. The action may be to auto ingest information, trigger workflow or notify a user, but should be appropriate for the care setting and use cases.

The volume of PDS Record Change event messages will most likely be high, as an event is sent for any change to the record, therefore it is recommended that subscriber system automates as much of the processing of the event and any subsequent PDS synchronisation as they can, only involving users where action is really required, in order to minimise additional workload on users.

For Example: If the patient’s email address is changed in PDS this should automatically be consumed into the patients record, but if the patients name has changed the consumer may wish to trigger a particular workflow or notify a user.

Requirements

This change is focused on the timely consumption of mobile phone numbers and email addresses from PDS, as these details are now being updated by the citizen using NHS Login when accessing the NHS App. The mobile telephone and email information must be automatically consumed and used by the subscribing system when they are updated on PDS.

As the PDS Record Change event message is generic, for all changes to PDS, the implementation of this requirement within the consuming system should be done in a way which easily allows other elements of PDS record to also be automatically consumed.

Link to the PDS Record Change event message specification - https://developer.nhs.uk/apis/ems-beta/pds_record_change.html

Full Specification

https://developer.nhs.uk/apis/ems-beta/pds_record_change.html

Personal Demographics Service (PDS) V1.0.2

Assurance Approach

There is no requirement for legal, clinical or IG assurance for this change. 

Functional testing

• NHSD would expect the suppliers to functionally test the change, including unit tests and end to end integration – I.e. data ingestion from PDS.
• NHSD assume that suppliers have access to PDS intregration environments aligned with supplier integration environments as appropiate
• Suppliers functionally test any downstream updates for consuming systems and provide confirmation of the successful testing
• NHSD will provide analyst/product manager for witness testng and/or sign-off assurance documentation. Contact rob.bridgewater1@nhs.net

Performance testing

• NHSD assume suppliers will undertake any performance and testing according to agreed specifications and NFRs with the PDS team.