Hi
Got a question around PDS change of address messages which our EPR receives. Looking at the NHS link below
PDS Change of Address | National Events Management Service (NEMS) (nhsconnect.github.io)
It notes a known issue:
Important: There is a known issue with the way providers updated patient demographics on PDS. There is a common issue where address details flip flop on PDS as different providers update spine with the same address just in a different format as the PDS format does not match their own stored address format. This is being highlighted as it will cause an artificially increased number of Change of Address event messages being generated by PDS and flowing through the NEMS.
At present our customers are receiving many hundreds of ‘false’ address change messages each day which creating a huge amount of administrative overhead for them as they are having to manually review these changes.
My question is, does anyone know when this issue is likely to be resolved ?
Hi there,
I’m sure not certain unfortunately, do you mind raising this as an incident in service now please? This will allow us to track / prioritise your issue better.
Thanks
Hi Lee,
I’m unsure when this known issue when was added to the page. There was a feature built in September 2022 that prevented updates with exact matches in address data from being sent. However, I think the examples you’re referring to fall outside of the scope of that change.
Would it be possible to share some examples (and the incident ref# if raised), I’ll check the status of this then and see if anything is already underway.
Kind Regards,
Ian
Also worth adding the change Ian refers to includes suppressing case changes that we were seeing, these are now not coming through as changes. We have suppressed millions of address updates using this logic. If you can give some examples of the type of change you are seeing we can investigate how prevalent they are. if the address doesnt change or it is just a case change then we think we are suppressing these so we’d need to investigate. if they are more complex changes then we’d need to investigate if we can safely suppress.
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Thanks @stephen.koch. Below are some of the example messages we are receiving; even through they they are essentially the same address, its causing extra admin work at our customers sites as they need to manually sync with PDS because the address is flagged as being different. At present one of our customers has switched off the NEMS interface as its causing them too much of an on overhead from a back office admin perspective but they are keen to switch it back on as soon as possible; can these addresses be handled or be filtered centrally ?
@ashwini.tupe looping you in for visibility.
Thanks those examples are very helpful. We did build something that would use OS places to make addresses consistent and avoid these types of minor address changes, but we ran into issues this caused between primary care and PDS. We will take a look again and see if we can put in place some sort of standardization and then skipping changes which dont impact the standardized address. We’ll come back to you on this thread in the next few weeks once we’ve taken another look at this.
Thanks @stephen.koch, anything which can be done would be a huge benefit to our NHS Trusts who are using NEMS - all of them (10 Trusts now) are having the same issue and their confidence in NEMs is starting to erode quickly as the additional PDS sync admin overhead is creating more work for them than their previous processes.
In the case of situations where the address case is just different, aren’t these supposed to be already filtered out centrally, e.g.
To ensure we find a solution, would it be beneficial for our customers to log these issues as service tickets with NHSE too - I’m keen this is dealt with as a priority given its impact on both customers from a resourcing perspective but also from a safety perspective in relation to delivering child health services.
