Digital Medicine - FHIR API

Use this API  to notify a patient's registered GP practice of care services provided by a pharmacy, including:

• immunisation administration
• emergency medication supply
• new medicine service
• medication review
• digital minor illness referral service
• appliance use review

These notifications take the form of FHIR messages. For more details, see Digital Medicine - FHIR API.

This API can only be used where there is a legal basis to do so. Make sure you have a valid use case before you go too far with your development.

You must do this before you can go live (see ‘Onboarding’ below).

The following API is related to this API:

• Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) API - use this API to transfer messages and large files securely across health and social care organisations

The following API standard is also used to implement this API:

• Interoperability Toolkit 3 Messaging Distribution FHIR API standards - use this API standard to implement a set of generic messaging components using HL7 FHIR STU3 to create a unified approach to NHS message and document flows across England

This API is in beta.

This API is a silver service, meaning it is available 24 x 7 x 365 but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

This API is a FHIR API.

For more details, see FHIR.

You can access this API via:

• the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN)

• the internet

For more details, see Network access for APIs.

Application-restricted access

This access mode is application-restricted, meaning we authenticate the calling application but not the end user.

You can use this access mode as follows:

• unattended (end user not present), for example periodically submit ambulance data from ambulance trust systems to DPS

This API uses MESH.

As a developer, you are most likely to want to connect to MESH using either the MESH client or the MESH API.

For more details about using the MESH client, see MESH client.

For the MESH API, there are several independent, externally accessible instances of MESH you can use for testing. For full details, see MESH API - Environments and testing.

You need to get your software approved by us before it can go live with this API. We call this onboarding. The onboarding process can sometimes be quite long, so it’s worth planning well ahead.

To onboard for this API, follow the Supplier Conformance Assessment List (SCAL) process.

For a full list of interactions for this API, see Digital Medicine - FHIR API.

For details on the general structure of the interactions, see FHIR.