Record Creation and Integrations

Connecting systems around the patient

Patients Know Best is built on the principle that the patient owns the data in their account. Our mission is to collect data from wherever it exists about the patient and to send it to wherever the patient wants.

How is data going to be collected and disseminated to the patient portal? In the early stages, it’s important to strike a balance between the ideal state and ease of implementation. Our integration specialists will work with your project and technical teams to determine which systems and data points are to be integrated, in which order, and using which messaging and transmission protocols.

Hospital IT systems usually exchange data with PKB using HL7 messages. This allows for fast integration with legacy systems, including laboratory information systems for test results, documentation systems for clinic letters and discharge summaries, radiology information systems for radiology reports, PACS systems for DICOM images and prescribing systems for medication records. Most customers send HL7 messages from their integration engines into PKB servers, and PKB staff take care of mapping from your coding systems into PKB structured data.

We also provide REST and FHIR APIs, which between them provide access to the majority of data points (see our quick guide) in a patient's record using OAuth 2.0 for authentication. This is great for modern development of smartphone apps, integration with third-party web sites and enabling Single Sign On (SSO) with PKB .

NHS App integration is available for regions that configure PKB as their patient-held record and NHS Login integration for single sign-on can be used in all regions in England.

For developers, full technical details of how to integrate with PKB, including the capabilities of our HL7, FHIR and REST API are available in our dev wiki