Using ITK3 to support GP Connect Messaging

As described in Design Principles, the ITK3 Message Distribution standard, v2.5.0 has been adopted by GP Connect Messaging capabilities to provide message reliability and to facilitate alignment with practice workflow.

FHIR messages

All messages sent according to the ITK3 standard specification are constructed using the HL7 FHIR® STU3 standard using the FHIR Messaging framework.

The ITK3 standard builds on the FHIR Messaging framework through a set of messaging extensions, which are provided through a profile of FHIR MessageHeader resource.

This extension of the FHIR messaging framework provides some messaging options such as:

• the ability for a sender to request a positive or negative “infrastructure” acknowledgement message to be returned which indicates the success or failure of the processing of the message at a technical level
• the ability for a sender to request a positive or negative “business” acknowledgement message to be returned which indicates the success or failure of the processing of the message at a business process level
• various message meta-data elements

Please refer to the messaging capability and messaging use case pages for details of which of these options is mandated or recommended for the particular message being created.

ITK3 Response processing

Where the message sender requests an ITK3 acknowledgement (known as ITK3 Response), the sending system is responsible for processing the received acknowledgement and acting accordingly.

For example, where an ITK3 Response indicates that a technical error was processed by the receiver when validating the message, the message sender is responsible for taking the action necessary to re-send a corrected message.