We are very pleased to welcome you to the latest edition of our NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) - Integration and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) newsletter. In it, we aim to keep you up to date on all aspects related to our work and as valued Business Partners in this effort, we hope you find it useful.

In this edition, we bring you news on the first site who has successfully implemented the Clinical Referral Information (CRI) APIs, a new development environment which will assist in reducing overall development timescales, and highlights of some of the new development themes we are currently progressing.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust goes live using e-RS APIs

A successful collaborative project, between Imperial and NHS Digital, recently delivered the first Business Partner implementation of the Service’s new CRI API functionality. An interoperability partnership was quickly established between Imperial’s ICT Projects and the e-RS Integration teams, who were then tasked with making available the CRI or ‘Referral Letter’ within the e-RS application to Imperial’s internal document repository and online vetting solution. Through close technical and implementation collaboration, a new Target Operating Model (TOM) approach for product assurance was piloted leading to a successful launch on the 17th December 2018. This is now helping the Trust to realise its NHS England Paper Switch Off (PSO) Programme benefits, reducing administrative costs, achieving quicker patient care and providing a firm foundation for deeper clinical review integration, associated to the processing of over 100,000 first outpatient appointment each year.

Click here to watch a recent webinar with Imperial College and NHS Digital.

To find out more about integrating with e-RS visit the e-RS API Developer Hub.

New Path-to-Live Environment for API Partners

The NHS e-RS Programme has now delivered a new API focused Path-to-Live (PTL) environment. This has been called e-RS DEV3 and is now accessible through the Development (DEV) Care Identity Service (CIS) and Spine Core network domain. The new environment will act as a test repository for the growing range of e-RS Alpha APIs. As this environment will exist outside of the monthly PTL software release cycle, it is now able to provide increased responsiveness to new user needs and change requests. The e-RS Integration Portfolio team will be able to design, implement and release new, agile functionality and respond to changes within a period of days rather than the existing monthly release cycle. Connectivity information and service notifications are now available through the NHS Digital Assurance Support Portal.

Referral Request API Suite Update

Through successful external stakeholder engagement, the NHS e-RS has now commenced activity to design, build, release and assure a new, live Beta suite of Referral Request APIs. This activity builds upon end user and systems supplier feedback on the elaboration and prototyping of an early Alpha suite, allowing end users the ability to create quick and easy referrals in the e-RS solution. The planned live suite will support an application workflow equivalent to the current Professional Application interface functionality, with compliant systems able to search for patient services, create a referral, upload clinical attachment(s) and print the patient referral request letter. This FY2018-19 roadmap deliverable represents the completion of development and release of new APIs into the live service application code and made available for collaborating partners to commence development and assurance.

New Clinical Review API Suite

The Integration Team has recently completed the functional testing and initial release of their new provider ready Clinical Review Suite of APIs. This suite comprises Alpha versions of service provider clinician and service provider clinician admin, Accept, Reject and Re-direct API endpoints. The earlier developed Accept and Reject APIs have now been supplemented from Release 8.2 with an adaption of the existing NHS e-RS re-direction functionality to represent a single Re-direction Lite or Consultant Action endpoint, which will allow providers to create an internal administration tasks within the professional application interface with a single step. This will allow solution developers to embed next stage Clinical Review actions into their foundation Clinical Referral Information (CRI) with three single buttons. These APIs are now available for Business Partners to connect and review, with expressions of interest sought by the team for partners, users and stakeholders to work on their early adoption with. If you are interested in helping shape their future enhancement Beta development, please get in contact with the team.

National guidance has been published setting clear expectations for health and care organisations who want to use cloud services, and who want to remove dependency on N3 or HSCN networks in order to provide access to its systems to a wider set of users over the public Internet. In response to this guidance, NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS) network addresses and names (URLs) will change in July 2019. It is therefore critical that each organisation confirms that its network configurations will indeed allow its users and systems continued access to e-RS.

Further detail of this change and how it could affect you can be found here, including a list of the URL changes. Please take time to read this to ensure that you can continue to access e-RS following this change. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact the e-RS technical team at ers.tech@nhs.net.

Platform Environments and Support

The NHS Digital Solutions Assurance (SA) Service Desk has been rebranded as the Platforms Support Desk with immediate effect. Their new email address is platforms.supportdesk@nhs.net (there is no change to their telephone number). This change does not affect any services or environments currently supported by the team in any way.

Please contact the new Platforms Support Desk for new requests, PTL incidents or to receive their regular newsletter updates. For more information about the Assurance team and the various environments, please visit the Assurance Support Portal (HSCN/N3 networks only).

We are currently working with numerous Business Partners to get their solutions integrated with the NHS e-RS and so now is a great time to get involved. In line with current GDPR regulations if you are interested in becoming a Partner and receiving more information about integrating with e-RS please complete the Partner Registration Form.