Retrieving referral and A&G latest status into Microsoft Fabric for analytics

e-Referral Service (e-RS) e-Referral Service FHIR API
1

We’re targeting to retrieve eRS referral and A&G status into Microsoft Fabric for analytics.

We’re currently in design phase and exploring a design where Microsoft Fabric (notebooks/pipelines) directly calls the eRS APIs and ingests data into OneLake, ideally without introducing an intermediate middleware layer.

Has anyone implemented a similar approach, or does this sound feasible in practice?

In particular:

  • Is Fabric alone sufficient for reliable ingestion of eRS APIs (A008/A023)?

  • If a middleware layer is needed, is Azure Functions a reasonable/common choice in this context?

  • Any known limitations (e.g. authentication) when calling eRS APIs directly from Fabric?

2

Hi @Howard_Lai

We don’t have any integrations but unfortunately this is not a supported use case. The e-RS API is for clinical use, not for reporting/analytics.

3

Hi @tony.marsh1

Thank you for the clarification.

I think I may have used the term “analytics” too broadly.

We are not looking to use the API for secondary reporting purposes. Our focus is on retrieving data from the Referral for Review Worklist and Advice & Guidance Worklist.

The intention is to provide visibility of these worklists to clinical teams to support the clinical review, prioritisation and monitoring of referrals and Advice & Guidance activity as part of managing patient pathways.

Although we are not currently planning to accept or reject referrals via the API, we are looking to support provider workflows by enabling clinicians to receive and review referrals as part of their day-to-day service delivery.

Would it be more accurate to describe this as consuming provider worklist data to support clinical workflow use cases? If this use case is appropriate, we will proceed to explore the integration approach and continue with the design phase.

Many thanks,

Howard

4

@Howard_Lai Thanks for the response - I’ll have a read through this comment properly this afternoon and provide some guidance back :slight_smile:

5

Hi, sorry for the delay, I’m on leave so had a few things to sort, can you complete the form under 2.21 (ignore the apps if you’ve not set them up, we dont want to waste your time if we can’t support the submission) https://digital.nhs.uk/services/e-referral-service/api/integration-process/stage-2-build

Key thing is really the benefit this brings to the organisation - our main use case is to ensure referral data is getting to the right place (at scale) to ensure quicker triage, and avoid large admin overhead - if you support this case we’d of course be interested.