National Health Application and Infrastructure Services - NHAIS GP Links

Use this integration to manage GP registrations and other patient data in National Health Application and Infrastructure Services (NHAIS) and Primary Care Registration Management (PCRM).

You can:

• register a patient at a GP practice
• receive a patient deregistration (deduction) notification at the previous GP practice
• update patient demographics information, such as address

This integration uses MESH to send and receive messages. 

This integration forms part of the end-to-end GP registration process. For more details on the end-to-end process, see our GP registration digital guide.

NHAIS is being replaced by Primary Care Registration Management (PCRM).

The two services are currently running in parallel, with some geographical regions using PCRM and some using on NHAIS, and with more regions being migrated each month. Once the migration is complete, NHAIS GP registrations will be retired.

Requests sent via NHAIS GP Links are automatically routed to NHAIS or PCRM as appropriate by MESH. GP systems do not need to make any changes to their GP Links integration to cater for the migration.

This integration 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, by contacting us.

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

The following APIs are related to this integration:

• GP2GP - HL7 V3 API - use this API to transfer patients' electronic health records between old and new practices when they change GPs.
• Personal Demographics Service - FHIR API - use this new API to search for patients, retrieve patients by NHS number and update patients.
• Personal Demographics Service - HL7 V3 API - use this if you want to use functions that are not yet available on the FHIR API.
• Messaging Exchange for Social care and Health (MESH) - use this component of the Spine to deliver messages and files to registered recipients.

This integration is in production.

This integration uses MESH which is a silver service, meaning it is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

Native integration

This integration uses asynchronous messaging. In particular:

• you send and receive messages via our MESH messaging hub
• the message payload format is EDIFACT

For more details on using the native integration, see our NHAIS developer document library.

RESTful adaptor

Alternatively, you can access this integration via our NHAIS GP Links adaptor - a component you deploy yourself that provides an easy-to-use FHIR-compliant RESTful API.

This integration uses MESH which is available on both the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) and the internet.

For more details, see Network access for APIs.

This integration uses MESH which is an application-restricted API.

The integration does not perform any end user authentication or authorisation checks. Rather, the calling system is expected to perform them. The authorisation rules are specified in our national Role Based Access Control (RBAC) database.

For more details see our national Role Based Access Control (RBAC) database on the registration authorities and smartcards page.

For more details, contact us.

You must get your software onboarded before it can go live.

For more details, contact us.

This integration uses the following MESH workflow IDs to manage GP registrations and other patient data:

• NHAIS_RECEP
• NHAIS_REG

For more details on using the native integration, see our NHAIS developer document library.