Automatically Adding Patients to Teams

To automatically have a full and accurate list of patients in PKB teams and include team codes with PKB’s HL7 API.

Why

• Every time you set up a new team in PKB the team will no longer need to maintain a list of patients they are treating, as PKB will have the accurate list automatically

• The team can focus on the clinical side of adding care plans to each patient’s record in the clinic and responding to messages from the patients outside of the clinic

• This will allow your patients to get immediate access to the team’s resources, including library links, care plan templates, consultation questionnaires and messaging contacts

• This change also gives you more accurate statistics across and within institutions. In the past, a patient receiving HL7 data from multiple institutions would only have appeared in the statistics of the institution that created the patient’s record. Now the patient will automatically appear in all. In the past patients only appeared in a team’s statistics when a team had manually added the patients.

What

Your organisation can add patients to a PKB team by adding the alias for the appropriate teams in the ZTM segment of A28 and A31 messages. This change is built on implied consent. In other words, PKB interprets the HL7 message from a verified clinical institution as meaning the team is providing direct care to the patient and so should have the default privacy labels access the team had configured, e.g. no access for the typical Patient Record Teams of organisations.

This will work for any organisation regardless of the organisation that created the patient's record originally (our APIs had previously only supported adding patients to a team when creating their records). Institutions will be able to add patients to teams by adding the alias for the appropriate team(s) in the ZTM segment of A28 & A31 messages.

How

Every time an organisation sets up a new team they must populate the ZTM segment of relevant HL7 messages to link patients to this team.

1. PKB project manager sets up new team for customer

2. PKB integration specialist configures team code for HL7 feed

3. Customer integration specialist uses team code in HL7 feed

PKB notifies the registered patient and their carers that the patient is now in the team. As usual, the patient can change the sharing at any time in the Sharing tab.

Future

We will eventually expand this functionality so that teams can add patients outside of their organisation network via both the user interface and the bulk upload process using CSV files. We have not scheduled a date for this, it depends on what percentage of patients end up being covered by the HL7 feeds of customers vs the other routes.