What are advanced questionnaires?

PKB’s questionnaires feature is being updated to make it easier for clinical teams to gather information from their patients, including patients who have a PKB record but are not yet registered. The new questionnaires feature is now available via our FHIR APIs.

The new questionnaires will have an improved UI for patients completing the questionnaires and improved functionality for clinical teams to customise the questionnaires; including calculated fields, questionnaire scoring, branching, and coded data.

See our Advanced questionnaires features page for an overview of all the new features.

When can I use Advanced Questionnaires?

We will be rolling out advanced questionnaires functionality iteratively. See the Development Plan below for details about what is going to change and when.

Development and rollout plan

December 2023 - APIs (Complete)

The first phase of development for advanced questionnaires, which has now been released, has made new FHIR API endpoints available. Clinical teams can use these endpoints to send questionnaires to patients and retrieve their responses.

The patient’s answers, as well as the questionnaires themselves, will be stored in our database and can be retrieved as Questionnaire and QuestionnaireResponse FHIR resources.

Whilst clinical teams can send advanced questionnaires and retrieve responses now that we have released the new API endpoints, the new questionnaires will not be immediately available in PKB’s UI.

When questionnaires are triggered via the API, patients will receive an email notification containing a link to complete the questionnaire. Once the patient has completed the questionnaire, they will be directed to a landing page which confirms they have completed the questionnaire. For unregistered patients, this page will have an option for them to register via NHS login.

At this point, teams who send questionnaires only via integration (and not via the user interface) can begin using advanced questionnaires.

February 2024 - Patients can see questionnaires on the Events & messages page

March 2024 - Professionals and coordinators can send questionnaires and export responses via the UI

Q2 2024 - Completed questionnaires can be edited

Q2 2024 - Patients can initiate questionnaires via the UI

Next steps

In the months after making the new Advanced Questionnaire API endpoints available, we will introduce important Advanced Questionnaire functionality into the UI. This includes:

Patients will be able to view new questionnaire requests in their record, as well as continue answering questionnaires that they have not finished and viewing completed questionnaires. Patients will be able to start or continue questionnaires directly from the Events & messages page.
Professionals and coordinators will be able to trigger an Advanced Questionnaire via the UI
Professionals and coordinators will be able to export Advanced Questionnaire responses via the UI

We expect this functionality to be available in early 2024.

Future work (Coming soon)

We will then move onto development of other features related to Advanced Questionnaires, including:

Making the QuestionnaireResponse available via our APIs as a PDF
Allowing organisations to retrieve a link to an Advanced Questionnaire, so that it can be sent to patients via SMS
Allowing patients, and other users, to edit completed questionnaires from the PKB UI
Allowing carers to complete Advanced Questionnaires on behalf of patients
Allowing patients and professionals to send secure messages about an Advanced Questionnaire

Can I use Advanced Questionnaires?

Advanced questionnaires can currently only be sent to patients using our questionnaire APIs. This means that your clinical team can only send advanced questionnaires to patients if your Trust has built an integration with these new APIs.

If you have an existing integration for sending questionnaires, you can continue to use that until your Trust has built the new integration.

If you send questionnaires to patients via the user interface (UI), you can keep sending these questionnaires via the UI until we move your team to advanced questionnaires.

Advanced Questionnaires