Roadmap Jan - July 2023
- Joanne Crean
This roadmap supports our 2020-2023 product strategy. It is updated quarterly so that we can make sure we are building the right features for our users and customers.
Our prioritisation is guided by feedback from our customers. We conduct user-research with patients and healthcare professionals and collate feedback that customers give our staff.
Subscribe to our blog to receive updates on what’s being released each month, including minor changes that are not on this roadmap. The feature category of the Patients Know Best (PKB) blog contains all our development blog posts.
Overview
Q2 2023
Integrations
FHIR APIs
PKB is committed to full interoperability through FHIR APIs. We are gradually transitioning our system to a FHIR-native architecture during 2023, one datatype at a time.
Appointments, conditions, medications, observations
Each data set will be mapped, migrated, aggregated and made available via the read-only FHIR API and our web application. We are prioritising the data sets from London’s Discovery Data Service as this will provide the GP and community records to patients treated in London.
We will move on to observations next. This includes data that populates the Tests and Measurements pages in PKB records.
The remaining data types will be sequenced depending on customers’ abilities. We prioritise releasing the most data to the most patients.
Send questionnaires FHIR API improvements
We released a FHIR API endpoint for sending questionnaires at the end of 2022. This API allows an organisation to tell PKB to send out a questionnaire to a patient. This is great for Patient-Initiated Follow-Up (PIFU) and pre assessment/triage workflows.
We’ve added the following features to the API:
switch email notifications to professionals about responses on or off
send to patients who have been invited but have not yet registered
use national or organisations identifiers to identify patients
We’re working on:
allowing the “additionalIdentifier” parameter sent with questionnaires to be included in the questionnaire response, organisations can search for questionnaire responses with this ID
allowing questionnaires to be sent to patients who aren’t in the sender’s team
Remove from teams via HL7 API
It is possible to add patients to teams via our HL7 API. Next, we want to give customers a way to remove patients from teams. We have published the specification for this API for feedback.
NHS App Wales
PKB will be available for users of NHS App Wales, where an organisation has chosen to offer PKB to their patients.
MedMij certification in the Netherlands - data deletion
Dutch digital health data standards regulator MedMij, has certified PKB as a personal health record (or PGO as it is better known in Dutch). PKB’s PGO is delivered with Dutch partner CarePoint. This means that citizens in the Netherlands can pull their health information into their PKB record. To remain certified, we are making it possible for patients to delete data sent by CarePoint from their records.
Web application changes
Questionnaires uplift
We are uplifting our questionnaires(consultations) functionality.
After phase one of this project, organisations can:
Add simple calculations, details of the calculation will be visible
Add branching so that it’s easier for patients to complete the parts of the form that are relevant for them
Add coded fields, e.g. Snomed CT codes so that data from the questionnaire can be show in other parts of the patient’s record
Add help text
Save drafts
Set mandatory questions
Add validation for answers
Send questionnaires to patients that aren’t registered or already in your team
Phase one focuses on completing the questionnaire. Questionnaires can be sent to patients via a FHIR API and the responses can be retrieved via a FHIR API. We will work on phase one in Q2 2023. Questionnaires with complex calculations will not be supported as PKB cannot be used as a medical device.
Phase two focuses on the PKB UI. We’ll improve the display of responses in the patient’s ‘Events and messages’ section. Organisations can trigger questionnaire sending, download responses and edit/amend responses in the UI. We will have an API to let organisations generate a questionnaire link to send to patients, e.g. via SMS.
Test results in the notifications panel
Patients will see their latest test results in the notifications panel and will not have to navigate away from the notification to see the value. When patients click the notification, they will see more information about the test result and previous results for that test.
Freeze records
We are expanding our freeze record feature to allow a professional to freeze any record. Currently it’s restricted to those under 18 years old.
Messages to deactivated professionals
It will no longer be possible for a patient to continue a message thread with a professional who has been deactivated from teams.
Symptoms display improvements
If a patient records more than one severity for a symptom, we will show the worst severity on the symptoms timeline, rather than an average severity. This lets professionals easily check when the patient has been recording more severe symptoms.
Next projects
These are the projects currently planned to start after the projects that are in progress. There are no delivery dates available for these yet. This section will be updated regularly.
Integrations
FHIR API to retrieve Practitioner ID
This FHIR API will let organisations pull back a practitioner ID for the practitioner who is sending questionnaires to patients, without needing to ask PKB for support with this.
Web application changes
Tests display improvements
We are currently working on designs for a condensed list showing the latest test results so patients can review them all together at a glance. We will be taking these designs back to patients for further usability testing, but the improvements we are looking to make are:
separating the latest results into a list view
showing key information on the page in a condensed version
indicating whether the results are up or down from the previous value
allowing users to search for test results in the list
Request appointment workflow
Organisations will be able to manage appointments requests by allowing patients to request an appointment from their record. When an organisations enables this, there will be a new button to request an appointment. Clicking on this will start a message thread in PKB, similar to the existing appointment messaging feature.
Accessibility: Website navigation
PKB is committed to meeting WCAG standards. The first changes we will make will be to the navigation bar of the patient view. Our Accessibility Statement has been published in our user manual. We’ve been testing our designs with users to make sure that it’s intuitive and easy-to-use.
Automatically add plans to records
We are exploring options to allow a team to have a default plan that we add to their patients’ records when the record is created.
PKB customer sites: deploy | developer | information governance | procurement | manual
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