Lab Results adaptor

Use this adaptor to access the Pathology and Bowel Cancer Screening laboratory results via an easy-to-use FHIR-compliant queue interface.

This adaptor is a self-hosted component - you must deploy it within your own environment.

This adaptor is in beta.

We are currently in private beta, working with a limited number of partners to gain feedback and improve the service.

The latest version of the adaptor is v0.0.1.

The following diagram illustrates the adaptor:

The adaptor downloads EDIFACT laboratory results from MESH, translates them into FHIR (DSTU3) format and puts them on the Outbound GP Queue (AMQP 1.0 protocol). This queue is the integration point from where the Pathology and Screening medical reports can be fetched by any other application.

This adaptor is a self-hosted component - you must deploy it within your own environment. You can deploy the adaptor where you like, for example in a public or private cloud environment.

To demonstrate what we think makes a secure, scalable, and available deployment, we have created two examples of cloud environment, based on AWS and Azure.

We have used Terraform for automated deployment.

For more details on the two exemplars and Terraform implementations, see the Lab Results Adaptor GitHub repository.

A Docker image for the adaptor can be found within Docker Hub along with the install guidelines:

• Lab Results docker image

In order to perform end-to-end testing of this adaptor, you need access to an NHS Digital test environment. We provide several environments to test these adaptors against:

• Opentest is an environment which can be used to perform initial test activities such as proof of concept where a Health & Social Care Network (HSCN) connection is not available.
• all other integration test activities are to be performed within a Path To Live environment. These activities include Development, Integration, Deployment and Non-functional tests.

To set up and configure Opentest, see Set up NHS Digital Opentest connection.

To set up and configure Path to Live connectivity, see Path to Live environments.

Lab Results adaptor will require access to the Laboratory test environment through a relevant MESH mailbox.
For access to this environment, please email the NHS Digital Platforms Support Helpdesk with your contact details and the following specific requirements:

• a single MESH mailbox
• the number of laboratories linked to this mailbox

For each Laboratory we need to know:

• NHS Code (15-digit) – read SRID_01_A_001.doc for more information
• MESH mailbox owned by the Laboratory to be able to send NHSACK confirmation messages back

For details on integration testing, see the integration testing section of our GitHub repository.
Contents include:

• pre-requisites for integration testing
• how to run local integration testing
• starting and testing the adaptor as docker containers
• running integration tests against mock components 

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

For more details, see onboarding.

Find out how to operate this adaptor in your own infrastructure in our GitHub repository. 

This covers areas such as log consumption, tooling, audit and other useful topics.

The Lab Result adaptor exposes only one HTTP endpoint used for health check purposes. For details, see the Lab Results adaptor dockerhub documentation.