How

When a patient receives a questionnaire request in PKB, there are 2 ways in which PKB can notify the patient:

1. Via an email notification, sent to email address stored in PKB

2. Via SMS message, sent to mobile number stored in PKB (this requires PKB’s SMS functionality to be enabled at the organisation)

As a PKB notification can only be sent to patients who have either or both an email address and a mobile number on their PKB record, there may be patients who have received a questionnaire request, but who cannot be sent a PKB notification to inform them. It is recommended that these patients are contacted by the trust via another route.
You can therefore pull patient demographic details, including the email address and contact numbers, from PKB to check whether a patient falls into this category.

All registered patients must have an email address in PKB and therefore must be able to receive at least the email notifications, so to help determine which patients may be missing both an email and mobile number in PKB, you can also pull and maintain a list of registered patients. Any patient on the list must have an email address and therefore will not need to be checked. Any patient not listed, may be missing both and email address and mobile number and therefore should be checked.

Checking For Registered Patients

This can be done using PKBs QRY^A19 API. Because this is a HL7 API, you can use the same HL7 credentials which were used in Step 1.

Following the QRY^A19 STA specification, it is possible to use the QRD segment to specify that you want to run a query a status request (STA) and that you only want to return patients who are registered (REGISTERED):

Once you have an initial list, this can be updated periodically by running the same query, but using the QRF segment to specify that you only want to pull patients who have before registered since the last time the query was run:

Checking Whether Individual Patients Have Email Addresses or Mobile Numbers

Once you have your list of registered patients, if a patient is added to the waiting list validation team and is not listed as registered, a FHIR Facade API can be used to find out if a patient has an email address or mobile number on their PKB record.

If you don’t have any already, PKB will provide you with FHIR Facade credentials, which consist of a Client ID and Client Secret. With these, you call following the OAuth 2.0 process in order to obtain a valid access token, which can be used to run the FHIR Patient API.

Once you have your access token, you can run the GET Patient FHIR Facade API, using the patients NHS number as a patient identifier.

Example

When run, PKB will return a response such as the below example. You can see in this response that within the telecom information, both an email address and a mobile number are provided. This shows that the patient does have these details held against their PKB record and will be receiving both email and SMS notifications from PKB.

Example Response