Appointment Partners

Current behaviour

PKB currently has a lightweight approach to managing the interaction between an appointment stored in PKB and a patient facing appointment management system that allows a patient to manage (e.g. reschedule, cancel) that appointment.

See our Appointment URL Links page for more information.

This page outlines our plans for upgrading support for our appointment management partners to allow a richer and more reliable user experience.

Proposed behaviour

In the first phase of upgrading our appointment partner functionality, PKB will start tracking a management URL with each appointment.

Workflow

1. Before an appointment partner can make use of this functionality, they must first be granted access credentials by PKB as part of our existing HL7 Partner process. This is a one-off configuration task.

2. For each shared customer (PKB organisation) that wishes to make use of this integration, the customer must confirm with PKB that they authorise the appointment partner to update their appointment data (e.g. by providing a management URL). PKB will then issue a textual alias to the appointment partner to capture the relationship between the partner and the customer.

3. Whenever an appointment partner wishes to add a management URL to an appointment in PKB, they send an HL7 SIU S14 message. This message will include only the necessary information required to identify the appointment, along with a custom HL7 segment which contains the management URL. The identifying information will consist of:

   1. MSH-4. This must contain the alias for the relevant customer. Our syntax requires this to be provided twice in the format: alias{alias} - see our HL7 Partner pages for more information.

   2. PID-3. This must contain the patient identifier (e.g. NHS number).

   3. PID-7. This should contain the patient's DOB to assist with our soft matching logic.

   4. SCH-1. This must contain the appointment placer ID, typically issued by the customer PAS.

HL7 SIU S14 changes

The HL7 update logic will ignore any fields not provided, as is currently the case. This means that the appointment partner can simply omit the key appointment details (e.g. start time, location) and PKB will not overwrite or delete these.

Example

Web UI changes

PKB will upgrade our web interface so that appointments which have had a management URL provided will display an additional "Manage" option. When a patient clicks on this option they will be redirected to the appointment partner's management interface to interact with their appointment.