Developer integration survey - January 2023

Overview

We’re on a mission to make integration easier.

Every year since we started the API Management programme (except for 2022) we have conducted an annual survey to get your views and thought it would be a good idea to share the results with you.

This page contains the results of the survey from January 2023.

Approach

We ask you to rate us on a 1-to-5-point scale, on several different areas plus an overall rating. Then we take the average. We also ask you to explain your answers.

This year’s survey

Job roles of survey respondents

You're working across the software development industry, as software developers, architects, delivery managers, product owners, CTO/CIOs and so on.

Most of you are from larger (100+ people) companies but with a mix of smaller sizes. The majority of companies are in commercial software development, and you’re creating a broad range of software, from patient-facing applications to GP software.

APIs being used by respondents: PDS 30, GP Connect FHIR 21, NHS login 18, e-RS FHIR 15, CIS2 14, MESH 9

Despite the PDS FHIR API being the most popular API, you use a wide range of APIs. Some are on our new API platform, but many are older APIs which don’t benefit from its new features.

So, you gave us a mixed set of responses, not just for APIs based on our new API platform.

Results

The ratings we ask you for every year are:

Learning – our documentation and tutorials.

Design and build – the technical part of API integration.

Testing – checking the quality of your API integration.

Onboarding – getting clinical and technical approval to use an API.

Help and support – from our mailbox (and new developer community).

Overall rating - on how well you think we’re doing in general.

Learning

Responses on ease of learning

We scored 3.67 - up from 3.1 and 2.1 in previous years.

Positive comments	Suggested improvements
“a breath of fresh air”	“multiple portals when a single one would be helpful”
“on par with what we find in private sector”	“too many places to find documentation, it doesn’t seem centralised”
“well laid out and explained” (PDS FHIR API)	“hard to see what has changed when FHIR APIs change”

Design and build

Responses on ease of design and build

We scored 3.74 - up from 3.1 and 2.4 in previous years.

Comments were much fewer, leading us to think that the technology is not really the problem.

Positive comments	Suggested improvements
“generally good with useable code examples”	“We need to check for patient opt-out using MESH. It’s old and tricky. We’d like a nice new REST API.”
“it’s been quite easy since we have worked with FHIR before”	“Wasn’t an example in our chosen language, Node”
“since the move from spine mini service to the new REST API the integration has been relatively easier”	“Dependence on JWT complicated integration”

Testing

Responses on ease of testing

We scored 3.6 - up from 3.0 and 2.3 in previous years.

Positive comments	Suggested improvements
“good testing experience”	“it would be good if the available test data sets were made more easily accessible”
“having integration environment APIs is great”	“the call rate limit makes it really hard to test”
“included Postman collection is perfect”	“very difficult when not all environments are set up the same and (test) patients differ between systems”

Onboarding

Responses on ease of onboarding

We scored 3.31 - up from 2.9 and 2.1 in previous years.

This is a mixed score covering our new digital onboarding process, the spreadsheet-based SCAL process, and older onboarding processes.

Looking at the digital onboarding score alone, the score jumps to 3.85 showing our new online process is definitely improving customer satisfaction!

Positive comments	Suggested improvements
“digital onboarding is much easier and allows you to make progress in stages”	“it would be very helpful to understand the requirements prior to the formal onboarding process”
“digital onboarding is a HUGE improvement from the Excel documents”	“a bit too much silos between teams/departments within NHS”
“kudos to the onboarding platform team – transformative"	“please kill the SCAL spreadsheet”

Help and support

Responses on ease of getting help and support

We scored 3.77 - up from 3.5 and 2.5 in previous years.

This has always been our strongest score, traditionally reflecting the work we put into our dedicated API support mailbox.

But it also reflects the recent introduction of our new developer community - where developers can help each other, as well as get answers from us.

Positive comments	Suggested improvements
“NHS API people tend to be friendly and helpful”	“Variable again. CIS2 onboarding excellent due to dedicated support team and regular meetings, MESH and PDS is still ongoing but the support does not appear as freely available.”
“the new dev community will be a welcome addition”	“a simple video reply would be great”
“Awesome!!! You guys are great!! I just think you could be even more self-service.”	“MS Teams can be problematic”

Overall score

Overall rating on ease of integration

We scored 3.78 - up from 3.0 and 2.3 in previous years.

Again, this is a mixed score, but if we look at the exit surveys this year for the PDS FHIR API, which uses our APIM platform and digital onboarding, the overall score jumps to 4.1 which is actually above the 4.0 target score we set ourselves back in 2020!

Conclusions and next steps

We’re delighted to see you think we’ve continuously improved across all areas.

Graph showing continuous improvement in all areas from 2020 to 2023

Charting all the scores over the past 3 surveys on the one graph, you can see the trend of continuous improvement.

If we can make all our APIs as easy to use as the PDS FHIR API, and apply digital onboarding to all our APIs, then we should hit our target score for the whole API estate. All of which we’re doing as fast as we can, but there’s still a lot to do!

Meanwhile, we continue to focus on helping our API producers understand what a good API looks like, through API design and documentation reviews. We also publish our API policies and best practice based on what works best for our API consumers.

What we are we doing with the survey results

As a result of the survey, our product owners got together to examine your feedback in detail and revise our roadmap accordingly.

From the survey, the improvements that we’ve moved up the priority list are:

supplying consistent test data across more APIs than currently
providing API onboarding requirements up front before the onboarding process

clarifying dependencies between APIs where access to one also requires access to others
including Node coding examples
making our internal patient data opt-out REST API externally facing

In addition, we recognise that onboarding is our weakest area, and that is a focus for improvements by moving more existing services to use digital onboarding.

Many thanks for your survey responses – they really do help with setting our priorities.
Remember, you can always suggest, comment or vote on features using our interactive product backlog.