FAQs - Questionnaires (Advanced) (FHIR)

Question

Response

Can requests be sent to patients outside of the questionnaire’s team?

Yes

Can requests be sent to unregistered patients?

Yes. If the patient has an email address and date of birth in their record, they will receive an email informing them of the questionnaire request, even if they are not registered.

Currently, if a patient does not have an email address or date of birth in their record, no questionnaire request will be sent, however this restriction will soon be removed.

Can unregistered patients complete questionnaires without having to register first?

Yes. Patients can complete the questionnaires without having to register, by clicking the link in the questionnaire email and providing their date of birth. After completing the questionnaire, the patient will be able to register via NHS login.

I want to send/retrieve questionnaires outside of a team, so why do I still need to specify a team ID?

All questionnaire requests must be sent on behalf of a team which has access to the template and therefore a Team ID is always required. This does not affect your ability to send requests to patients outside of that team.

The Team ID is also required when pulling back responses. Calls to the QuestionnaireResponse endpoint will return all QuestionnaireResponses that were generated from questionnaire requests sent by that team. 

Is there an API for obtaining Team IDs?

Currently there is no API which will provide this information. Team IDs will therefore be provided by PKB during the development of the integration feed.

How exactly can the date parameter be used when pulling responses?

The date is flexible and can be used to specify: Equal to, Greater than, Less than, Greater than or equal to & Less than or equal to.

We don’t hold patient NHS numbers. How else can we identify patients?

The APIs allow ‘NHS numbers’ or ‘PKB Public IDs’ to be used as patient identifiers. If you want to use the Public IDs, this will require some extra development to obtain these IDs from PKB.

I previously used the Simple FHIR APIs and had to include a Practitioner ID. Why is this no longer needed?

Questionnaire requests are now sent on behalf of a Team rather than a Practitioner. For this reason, a Practitioner ID is no longer required.

Can I choose what format the responses are provided in, in the FHIR response?

No, responses are always provided as a standard FHIR R4 resource in JSON format.

Can requests be sent to deceased patients?

No. If the Deceased flag has been added to a patient record in PKB, the system will prevent any requests from being sent for that patient.

How do I find out the ID of the Questionnaire templates we want to use?

Customers can obtain Questionnaire IDs themselves by using the FHIR GET Questionnaire API.

A search on the Questionnaire endpoint will return a bundle of all Questionnaires that the team has access to. 

Will a Questionnaire ID ever change?

Potentially. Questionnaire templates can be amended if needed. Depending on whether you, or any other customers, still need access to the old version. In this case, a new Questionnaire ID will also be applied to the new version in order to differentiate it from the old one.

If a questionnaire template has been updated to a new version, can we see which version of a template was used when pulling responses?

Yes, it is possible to see the template version in the questionnaire response bundle. The version number appears at the end of the canonical URL in the ‘questionnaire’ field.

Can the patient’s demographic details be included in the questionnaire response request?

Yes, it is possible to include the details of both the patient who the questionnaire relates to (Subject) and the patient who filled out and completed the response (Source).

Can we make changes to the questionnaire templates in PKB ourselves?

No. The Questionnaire templates are configured and maintained by PKB. 

Requests must be made with at least a week's notice to allow the changes to be reviewed, configured and deployed. Once the change has been made by PKB, the questionnaire will be updated after the next release, which could take up to two weeks. 

What is written in the email notification that an unregistered patient gets?

Dear [patient name],

[Organisation name] would like you to complete an online questionnaire to help them manage your care. Click here to complete the questionnaire: [link to questionnaire]

You need to register to see your record. To see your registration options, visit Register to Patients Know Best - Patients Know Best .

Alternatively, you will have previously been sent a registration link by email that you can use. If you are unable to find this email, please contact the organisation who invited you to register and they can send you a new registration link.

Please do not reply to this email; this address is not monitored. Log into your record to see your medical information and manage your care.

Yours,

Patients Know Best Help Team

What is written in the email notification that a registered patient gets?

Dear [patient name],

[Organisation name] would like you to complete an online questionnaire to help them manage your care. Click here to complete the questionnaire: [link to questionnaire]

Please do not reply to this email; this address is not monitored. Log into your record to see your medical information and manage your care.

Yours,

Patients Know Best Help Team

We have an SMS provider and want to send SMS messages to patients directing them to the questionnaire they need to complete. Is this possible?

Yes. When you send a questionnaireRequest to a patient, a URL will be included in the FHIR response from PKB. This is contained within an extension in the ServiceRequest information. This is the same URL link which patients receive in the email notification from PKB and directs them to the questionnaire template.

You can send these URLs on to the associated patients using your own SMS service.

Is there a way to prevent patients from receiving the email notifications?

If you are planning on setting up your own SMS message workflow to ask patients to complete their questionnaires, you may prefer patients not to also receive the link in the PKB email notification.

PKB does not currently have a way to allow customers to stop these email notifications, but this is something that is currently in discussion.

Do patients get a reminder if they haven’t completed the questionnaire?

No, there is no way to remind a patient to complete a questionnaire at this time.

For how long is the link to complete the questionnaire active?

The link to complete a questionnaire does not expire. 

Can patients see their questionnaire requests in PKB?

Yes, completed and uncompleted questionnaire requests can be seen in the Events & Messages section in the patients PKB record.

Can a patient complete a questionnaire from the same link more than once?

No. Once a patient has submitted the questionnaire, they cannot complete it again or edit their answers. 

Can I extract responses only for questionnaires that are fully completed and submitted?

Yes, there is a status parameter that will enable you to choose which responses you want to extract. So you can choose to only extract completed responses and exclude draft responses.

Also, if using the ‘authored date’ parameter, this will only include completed responses.

We want to include our own request IDs when sending questionnaire requests. Will this be provided back to us in the patients response?

Yes. A local request ID can be included in the body of the request as an ‘additionalIdentifier'. This is then stored against the ServiceRequest.

When pulling the patients response, you can include the ServiceRequest information (including any additionalIdentifiers) in the response. You can also filter using the additionalIdentifier if wanted.

How do you specify who has the ability to amend completed responses?

This is specified on each individual request. When sending a QuestionnaireRequest, you can use the amendableBy parameter to specify that patients, or professionals, or both should be able to amend the response only it has been completed.

What happens if the amendableBy parameter is not included in a QuestionnaireRequest query?

The system will default to not allowing the questionnaire response to be amended by anyone

If a responses is amended by a user (patient or professional) after it has been completed, does the ‘Authored date’ against the request get updated?

Yes, every time a Completed response is amended, the Authored Date is updated. This means that, if you are using the Authored Date filter and pulling new responses on a regular basis, you will still be provided with amended responses, even if you already pulled a previous version.