PUG 2025
Advanced Questionnaires in Practice
On Thursday November 6th 2025 PKB hosted a User Group Event dedicated to current capability and future roadmap for PKB’s Advanced Questionnaires.
The session highlighted the expanded breadth of features now available, integration with the NHS App and planned future enhancements. We also featured a valuable use case presentation from our partners at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.
Presentation from the PKB Product Team
James our Product Manager, covered PKB’s current capabilities and how they are already being used across 19 Trusts with around 100 different questionnaire templates. PKB Advanced Questionnaire features include branching, scoring, and coded data, alongside a new option for professionals and patients to amend completed questionnaires and enhanced email notifications for clinical teams.
To watch the PUG event in full, click on the video below.
Presentation and Use Case from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Ali Ahmed from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust presented their experience as an early adopter of Advanced Questionnaires, walking through the implementation and automation of questionnaires across North West London, detailing use cases and sharing the results achieved so far.
Automation and integration: Extending questionnaires into their EPR system, Cerner, and notifying clinicians via a Message Centre.
Use cases: Pharmacy repeat prescriptions, pre-operative (pre-op) assessment, and pre-clinic questionnaires.
Benefits: Significant savings in nursing and clinic time (e.g., over 4,000 hours saved in pre-op assessment by replacing 40-minute telephone triage with questionnaires), fast-tracking over 2,000 patients for surgery, and improving consultation focus for clinicians.
Lessons learned: The importance of system integration, clear patient communication (SMS notifications), digital inclusion alternatives, and continuous staff training and clinical engagement.
You can view the slides in full below.
The move from simple to advanced questionnaires
The image below displays additional features from a PKB simple questionnaire to an advanced questionnaire.
Q&A
A Q&A session at the end, enabled attendees to raise any questions and engage with other attendees. All questions and answers are below in the collapse section.
1. Question
Can a description be displayed to provide context for the raw scores shown to patients in their record when completing an advanced questionnaire?
Answer
Yes. As a rule, we add help text to the score which explains how the score is calculated (e.g., ‘the score is calculated by adding the scores from questions 1-5). We can add any other help text to help the user understand the score if the use case requires it.
2. Question
Will the questionnaires appear in the NHS App as they appear in the GIFs and screenshots on the slides?
Answer
If the patient accesses questionnaires via the PKB NHS App jump-off point, yes.
Suppose a patient is in a Wayfinder-enabled organisation and accesses their questionnaire from the NHS App document and questionnaires page. In that case, they will see the questionnaire in NHS App styling, (as shown in the screenshot below).
3. Question
The link to GOV Notify to send the Questionnaire link is great, in the future, could we use NHS Notify or NHS App notifications, which are free?
Answer:
Yes, we are currently working on NHS App Notifications & Messaging. Once we release this feature, patients with a PKB record will receive NHS App push notifications about advanced questionnaires.
These push notifications will take the patient directly to the questionnaire.
4. Question
When a questionnaire is amended, can we easily identify which question was amended or just the name of the person who made the latest amendment?
Answer
The FHIR QuestionnaireResponse resource, which stores answers to an advanced questionnaire, supports only one individual in the ‘author’ field, representing the user who answered the questions.
Therefore, when a questionnaire is amended by a user other than the one who originally answered it, the new user takes responsibility for all the answers.
PKB is exploring ways to store and display change history after a questionnaire has been edited, but we aren’t sure exactly how this will work yet.
5. Question
Is there scanning for uploaded documents to ensure no cyber risk?
Answer
Yes, when a patient uploads a file while answering an advanced questionnaire, PKB stores the file in cloud storage and scans it for malware.
If the scan identifies any issues, the file is quarantined, and the patient or other users can’t download or interact with it.
6. Question
Does the patient see the scoring calculation while completing the questionnaire? Does this create a risk that some people could use that information to inflate their scores to receive care sooner than others?
Answer
PKB can hide scores from the UI so they are only visible in the CSV export or when retrieving the answers as FHIR QuestionnaireResponse resources. This means nobody can see the score while viewing the questionnaire in the PKB user interface.
7. Question
Is there a library of questionnaire templates that can be used as is or adapted?
Answer:
PKB are working on building a questionnaire library as part of the questionnaires toolkit on the Deploy wiki. This will include generic or standardised questionnaires in use, as well as a guide on how to use them in your team.
8. Question
When scores from questionnaires are exported via the CSV export or FHIR API, are the questions that were used to calculate the score also included in the export?
Answer
Yes. The CSV export and the FHIR QuestionnaireResponse resource contain all questions and answers for a questionnaire.
9. Question
Can advanced questionnaires be sent in bulk or be automated to be sent when someone has a specific event in the EPR (e.g., a new appointment, discharge, or added to a team)?
Answer
Yes, questionnaires can now be sent via our APIs in response to specific events in the EPR. Next year, we will be implementing the ‘mass questionnaire’ feature for advanced questionnaires. This will allow professionals and coordinators to send questionnaires to every patient in a team via the UI.
What's Coming Next
In November’s release, patients will be able to initiate advanced questionnaires and our important NHS App integration expansion - first adding notifications for PKB questionnaires into NHS App and then integrating questionnaires fully into NHS App as part of the Wayfinder project.
For our latest blog on our development work around Advanced Questionnaires, click here.
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