I want to integrate my EPR with the NRL Consumer API

National Record Locator (NRL) FAQ-Product
1

I want to integrate my EPR with the NRL consumer API, so that my end users have a seamless user experience, but know that NRL acts as a signpost to provider systems. What, if any, other services may I need to integrate with to provide an end to end user journey, where my users can obtain the information they need from source?

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The pointer will detail the formats that a given record is available in. If you plan to integrate your own consuming application with the NRL API, you will need to be aware that pointers can point to different things in different formats.

Some pointers simply provide an indication of the organisations that a patient currently has a care relationship with, enable consumers to contact the service responsible for a patient for support.

Others will point to information that is digitally available in different formats. Formats may differ from one pointer to another.

Retrieval formats

An NRL pointer can point to a….

  1. PAPER RECORD - Pointers can signpost to public websites with contact details for a given organization that holds a records that is not available digitally
  2. DOCUMENT - Pointers can signpost to an unstructured PDFs
  3. DIGITAL RECORD - Pointers can signpost to structured data
  4. APPLICATION - Pointers can be deep links into 3rd party electronic patient record​

If you plan to integrate your own consuming application with the NRL API, you will also need to integrate with the appropriate retrieval mechanisms for your use case.

How consumers go about retrieving a record from a provider may differ from one pointer to another.

This will require integration with other services, in addition to the National Record Locator.

We refer to these other services as ‘retrieval mechanisms’. Not all records available in the same format will use the same retrieval mechanism e.g. not all PDFs are available via SSP.

Retrieval mechanisms

Examples include:

  1. The Spine Secure Proxy can be used to retrieve care plan PDFs
  2. The National Document Repository can be used to retrieve Lloyd George Record Folder PDFs
  3. The Care Identity Service’s Introspection Endpoint can be used to facilitate deep links into other Electronic Patient Records