Existing programmes of work have identified the immediate priority areas for development that will deliver significant benefits to the system. These are: medicines and allergies reconciliation (care connect profiles); acute and emergency discharge summaries (Transfers of Care); use of the NHS Number and uptake of SNOMED CT.
A recent interoperability questionnaire of providers, vendors, and other professional bodies conducted by INTEROPen, working with PRSB, NHS England and NHS Digital has largely validated these interoperability priorities.
Transfer of Care
The transfer of care specifications are part of the NHS Standard Contract with the initial set of specifications covering:
- discharge from inpatient care
- discharge from mental health
- discharge from A&E
- outpatient clinic letters
Read more about Transfers of Care here.
Read more about the Transfers of Care technical specifications here.
CareConnect
The CareConnect content consists of specifications for individual resources as well as the record level collection of the same resources. In addition to the data models, APIs are also defined for implementation. These specifications will support the transfer of information for medications, allergies, observations, diagnoses, procedures and a range of other information.
As with Transfer of Care, CareConnect forms part of the NHS Standard Contract requirements.
CareConnect API developer information
The CareConnect API is an API definition based on the CareConnect profiles, as curated and published by INTEROPen.
The current scope of the development was to create an API that can be used in a point-to-point fashion, so as to allow read-only access to clinical data within care systems. The API has been developed as a RESTful API using the HL7 FHIR standard (STU3 version).
The content scope of the API includes the following information:
- patient
- allergies
- procedures
- problems
- observations
- encounters
- medications
- immunisations
- implementation guide
The API implementation guide describes the CareConnect API and provides help with implementation. It's created in a public GitHub repository. Feedback on the implementation guide can be emailed to apilabs@nhs.net or sent via the GitHub issues feature.
Reference implementation
A reference implementation of the API has been created to demonstrate the functionality of the CareConnect API and to assist the development community with implementing the API . The reference implementation is based on the FHIR HAPI project as an open source project. The project is published as a set of Docker images, to allow easier local deployment.
Access the open source code.
Access the design documentation.
NHS Digital is hosting two instances of the reference implementation. These can be accessed via the internet and do not require an N3 network.
Main/stable release environment.
Development environment.
A secured version of the reference implementation is available by changing ‘http’ to ‘https’ on the endpoints. If you access the secure side you will need to get a token generated first. Instructions are in the security section of the implementation guide.
Roadmap
The roadmap of work includes:
- enhancements to leverage the Spine Security Proxy
- enhancements to add a 'get record' retrieval method
- enhancements to align resource profiles to revised INTEROPen CareConnect profiles
