Transfer of Care initiative

Transfer of Care API adoption optimises patient care through the improved timely availability of complete and accurate digital care records at the point of use. The formation of inappropriate care decisions due to missing or erroneous clinical information is less likely to occur and this in turn reduces the potential to harm a patient.

API adoption also imposes greater control on how correspondence is created, sent, received, and processed. This can reduce the administration burden and associated costs for both primary and secondary care settings, whilst improving correspondence trackability, so problems with correspondence can be spotted.

It also allows effective alignment of local and national systems. Considering support for these APIs better guides the investment in new systems.

Find out more about correspondence problems and opportunities.

Secondary care organisations must implement against the published STU3 API standards now. The APIs do not cover all correspondence types, such as ad-hoc letters, and exceptions do exist within the included use cases. Routine maternity discharges and paediatric mental health discharges are excluded from this initiative at present. Secondary care correspondence solutions would need alternative arrangements to handle these exceptions.

In future years, additional use cases may be progressed to create APIs across any health and social care setting. This could also see existing APIs uplifted to include one or more changes to the layers making up the APIs.

Previous interoperability work between secondary care and social care organisations is covered separately in the Assessment Discharge and Withdrawal (ADW) specification.

You do not have to take any specific action to receive FHIR based discharge and outpatient attendance letters directly into your clinical system but you should look out for them in GP workflow. User guides should be available from your clinical system supplier. If your practice wishes to view workflow correspondence via a third party document management system, this should be raised with both the clinical system and specialist system supplier. 

The make-up of the Transfer of Care APIs can be described in terms of a set of layered standards. A fully compliant Transfer of Care solution treats these layers as indivisible.