Personal Demographics Service change event (via MNS)

Sharing Clinical Data Multicast Notification Service (MNS)
1

Hello,

I am seeking a bit of guidance on the newly published generic PDS change event (Personal Demographics Service change event - NHS England Digital). Ideally, I want to create a subscription for a range of NHS numbers and only be notified when certain PDS attributes change (e.g., name, address) for that set of NHS numbers. I’m not sure it works in the way. Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Thanks, Keith.

2

Hi Keith,

Thanks for raising this – and for continuing the conversation over email as well. I’m replying here too so others have visibility of the response.

Your understanding is correct – the generic PDS change event can be filtered (e.g. by NHS number), and any change to a PDS record will trigger an event, but the payload won’t specify which field has changed, so a follow-up PDS lookup is required to determine that.

For your use case (subscribing to a large set of NHS numbers), we recognise that managing this via individual subscriptions isn’t scalable. We’re currently looking into options such as reference sets / cohort-based filtering to better support this kind of scenario.

We’ll share more detail here once we’ve worked through how this could operate and what timelines might look like.

Thanks,
Paul