Appointment Integration

Introduction

Providing patients with their appointments is a standard part of any PKB Trust deployment plan and we encourage our customers to send in all appointments that a patient needs to know about. See here for further considerations when setting up your appointments into PKB.

The Patients Know Best platform includes a "Diary" section, where patients can see the upcoming and past appointments related to their records. Appointments are usually added by way of an HL7 integration, which can facilitate appointments being sent by multiple providers engaged in patient care. PKB also supports patients and carers who manually want to add appointments into their PKB diary.

What is required

The following information is aimed at supporting customer's understanding of what is required with the HL7 integration.

• What data should be supplied

• How that data is displayed to patients when they look at appointments within PKB

• How an appointment (SIU) HL7 message should be constructed and what data should be added to which segment/field

• How an appointment can be updated or cancelled via HL7

• How non-attendance can be recorded

Including a Single Point of Contact

Contact details and relevant information about who patients should contact about an appointment (should they need to do so), is to be provided within the Description field (NTE-3.1) of the HL7 message.

PKB supports the sending of basic html within this field, allowing customers to utilise formatting such as paragraphs, making text bold, new lines etc. Using this capability will help ensure that data is presented in an engaging and accessible way to patients.

Please see the screenshot above for how this would display to a patient viewing an appointment within the PKB user interface

Updating an appointment

Details of existing patient appointments can be amended by sending an SIU S13 or S14 HL7 message, which have exactly the same structure as the S12 HL7 message above.

If an existing appointment is found for the patient with the same unique appointment identifier (value set in SCH-1.1), then that appointment will be updated. If a matching appointment can not be found, then a new one will be created, as long as the minimum required information is present.

If an appointment is updated that has a status of Cancelled or Did Not Attend (DNA), then it will be changed to being active.

Cancelling an appointment

Whilst appointments can not be deleted once sent, they can be cancelled. This is achieved through the sending of an SIU S15 HL7 message.

If an existing appointment is found for the patient with the same unique appointment identifier (value set in SCH-1.1), then that appointment will be set to a status of cancelled. If a matching appointment can not be found, then a new one will be created and set as cancelled, as long as the minimum required information is present.

The patient will see a red notice, in a large font on the appointments listing page which states the appointment is “Cancelled”.

Logging non-attendance by the patient for an appointment

Attendance at an appointment is inferred by it not being set to a status of “Did not attend” (DNA). If an appointment was not attended by the patient then that “status” should be sent to PKB. This is achieved through the sending of an SIU S26 HL7 message.

If an existing appointment is found for the patient with the same unique appointment identifier (value set in SCH-1.1), then that appointment will be set to a status of DNA. If a matching appointment can not be found, then a new one will be created and the status set as “DNA” , as long as the minimum required information is present.

The patient will see a red notice, in a large font on the appointments listing page which shows the appointment as “Did not attend”.

Further information

• Appointment considerations: things to consider when sending appointments into PKB