We are developing a multi-tenant SaaS application for UK care providers.
Our application already has patient records created and maintained by each care provider. These records existed independently of PDS and were not imported, copied, or synchronised from PDS.
For example, our existing patient record contains:
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Full name
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Date of birth
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Address
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Other patient information maintained by the care provider
We are now planning to integrate with the PDS FHIR API primarily to:
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Establish or verify the patient’s NHS identity/NHS number.
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Obtain the patient’s registered GP organisation where required for subsequent GP Connect integration.
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Use the NHS number as the national patient identifier when interacting with NHS services.
We do not intend to use PDS as the source of truth for our existing care-provider patient record, and we do not intend to overwrite our existing patient name, address, DOB, etc. with values returned by PDS.
We are therefore trying to clarify the following point from the PDS documentation.
The current PDS service documentation states:
“Use of PDS is mandatory if you need to access or manage patient demographic data in England, Wales or the Isle of Man.”
It then states:
“If you keep a local copy of patient demographic data, you must synchronise it regularly with PDS.”
The same documentation describes PDS as holding demographic data including:
“name, addresses, date of birth, gender and so on”
Our application does contain fields such as name, address and date of birth, but these are pre-existing, tenant-owned patient data, entered and maintained by care providers. They are not a local copy of PDS data and are not populated from PDS.
Questions
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Does the requirement to synchronise a “local copy of patient demographic data” apply to our existing patient records in this scenario, even though those records were independently created and are not copies of PDS?
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Is there a distinction in NHS policy between:
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a system maintaining a local replica/cache of PDS demographics, and
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a system maintaining independently sourced patient demographics while using PDS only for NHS identity verification/routing?
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If our existing patient demographics are considered independent data rather than a PDS copy, are there any specific requirements for how we should model or label the relationship between our patient record and the PDS patient/NHS number?
We would appreciate confirmation of the intended interpretation, as this affects our data model and whether we need to implement demographic synchronisation with PDS.