General General practice update - Register with a new practice

Personal Demographics Service (PDS)
1

We provide bolt on services to GP Practices and I believe NHS England classes us as an online consultation provider.

Are we allowed to make us of Personal Demographics Service - FHIR API - NHS Digital to change the General Practice.

The documentation says:

* the general practice should only be updated by primary care systems, [NHAIS](https://digital.nhs.uk/services/nhais) or by the National Back Office.

Although we are an online consultation provider we are also acting as a primary care system in this interaction and it would be primary care staff performing this request.

We can probably handle other parts of GP Registration process/workflow ourselves (such as changing contact and address details) but have not found a way around this part (other than a practice admin doing this part on a GP system).

2

Kevin,

the process or updating the practice is via GP links messages so you don’t update the practice via the the PDS FHIR API. The details of the changing a practice API are here National Health Application and Infrastructure Services - NHAIS GP Links - NHS Digital.

it would be better to move this changing in registration to a more modern API, however this api is dependent on a very old system called NHAIS which is in the process of being decommissioned so we need to complete that first before updating the API.

we also have a digital registration system so if you are looking at registrations you could integrate with that. I dont know btw whether your services cover the full primary care needs for a citizen, there probably is a policy aspect to that you’d need to check. I’m sure we’ do that as part of the onboarding process to GP links though.

thanks
Stephen

3

Thanks for the reply.

Those links are very useful. I think we’re trying to to this

Screenshot 2024-03-03 at 05.58.14
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I think we are seeing a slightly different workflow:

  1. ‘Send Details’ - we would allow the patient to update demographics on PDS (and rely on EMIS and TPP syncing with PDS).
  2. 'Register New Patient ’ - (Patient) Asking either a GP System or PDS to ‘register a new patient’ (if PDS, then PDS asks EMIS/TPP to register a new patient).

I think automating ‘Send Details’ is the main thing we want to automate at present and I think we can do that.
This only leaves ‘Register New Patient’ - we might be able to use the ‘direct integration coming in future’ (if it allows us to ignore updating demographics).

4

Kevin

HI for your point 1- if the patient is your user. Could you not use the PDS patient access mode as this would allow an NHS login (P9) patient to directly update PDS? - today contact details are allow listed but we are looking at what other fields may be needed to update.

re Register a New Patient, it might be best to have a call to discuss, as mentioned previously there is a national GP registration system which has been developed with 40% practices using the service. so it would be good to understand your use case to see how it fits. I will you contact direct