The NHS Booking and Referral Standard (BaRS) has been developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and is an interoperability standard to support patients who require a Booking and Referral across the NHS.
Part of the emergency response to COVID-19 was the introduction of the Emergency Department Digital Integration (EDDI) product, to enable referrals from 111 to Emergency Departments. This interim product was based on the CareConnect standard and also used the deprecated interoperability toolkit (ITK) standard. This was a short term fix for expedience, to support the pandemic response, in the knowledge that a long-term, strategic interoperability standard would be available in the near future. This standard would be system provider focussed, and created to enable provider systems to be fully digitally integrated between care settings.
The creation of BaRS delivers the strategic interoperability to facilitate a booking, and for any associated referral information to be shared between a sending organisation such as an NHS 111 Provider, and a receiving organisation such as an Emergency Department. BaRS is therefore an interoperability standard between patient record systems that enables booking and referral information to be sent between NHS healthcare system providers quickly, safely and in a format that is useful to clinicians.
BaRS will first be implemented within two use cases:
- NHS 111/clinical assessment services (CAS) to emergency departments (or A&E)
- NHS 111/clinical assessment services (CAS) to Urgent Treatment Centres (UTC)
Based on use cases and implementation of BaRS at different organisation types it is anticipated that there will be the need to amend the standard further down the line to include and support other new use cases.
This information standard is published under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. An Information Standards Notice (see below) provides an overview of scope and implementation timescales, and the requirements specification provides further detail for those who have to implement the information standard.