Overview

This table summarises our current roadmap. It shows recently completed work, what we are working on now, what we will work on next and the projects that we are planning beyond that.

The "Later" column of the roadmap includes work that we plan to explore, but these projects are not fully defined yet, and their timing or scope might shift as our understanding grows and priorities (ours, customers', governments') change. Projects in the “Later” column may have dependencies on other workstreams, for example we need to complete FHIR migration work to progress with Wayfinder Questionnaires and Documents, or they may require the same resources. For those reasons, we will determine the order of work as we get closer to running these projects. They are in the same column but that does not mean they will run in parallel.

Features

GP data for patients in England

Open

Open

Why is this a priority?

We want every patient to automatically have data from their GP in their PKB record.

Our integrations with EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne will use NHS login to link a patient to their GP practice to retrieve their data. As soon as they log in with NHS login, they will have their GP data in their PKB record.

1.5 million patients already log in using NHS login and this number is increasing by 1000 patients each day. This integration lets us easily give these patients their GP data without the patient needing to supply additional information.

This integration will initially be available for patients in England. Some patients in England are already getting GP data added to their PKB record or will get it from integrations set-up at an organisation level: EMIS Extract Service - 337,042 patients, North West London Data Discovery Service - 2.4 million patients. These integrations will remain active. We will de-duplicate GP data in a patient’s record if they are receiving it from more than one source.

We would like to expand this to other countries once they have the national infrastructure in place to allow us to build something similar there. Patients in the Netherlands can already get their GP data in their PKB record as PKB is a certified personal health environment (PGO) in the Netherlands.

What are we building?

• Integrating with EMIS Web and TPP SystmOne via the NHS IM1 programme.

• Once a patient logs in with NHS login once, their record will be pulled and will be regularly updated from that point. No further action is required by the patient.

• GP practice does not need to enable the integration with PKB but does need to have online services enabled.

• Will get demographics, conditions, medications, allergies, appointments, test results, measurements, immunisations, documents & carer information/proxy records. Data types will be added in phases.

• Data will be stored in FHIR format.

How are we rolling it out? 

• Initially will show conditions, medications and appointments in the UI.

• Will make other data types available via FHIR API: immunisations, allergies, procedures, observations.

• Will then gradually add more data to the UI as we migrate those data types to FHIR or add new screens in PKB. 

Roadmap

Patient activation

Why is this a priority?

This year we are introducing automated actions that will allow organisations to reach their patients at scale and give them actionable steps they can take to manage their health.

Patient activation is about empowering patients to take an active role in managing their health and wellbeing. This concept is central to PKB's mission. For us that means building a system that gives patients access to their health data, tools to take action, and educational resources.

We have been focusing on access to health records, working with organisations and governments to integrate data from various healthcare providers, including hospitals, GP practices, into one record and on providing tools for patients to engage, such as questionnaires, care plans and symptom trackers.

We can now focus on automated actions as a tool to personalise the patient experience. Organisations will be able to set rules to match patients, based on coded data in their records, and set actionable steps for those patients. Patients will see a prompt with the action in their record. This reduces the need for manual work by healthcare professionals and ensures that patients receive timely and relevant information. For example, a rule could be set to find patients who are eligible for a hospital’s clinical trial and those patients will be prompted to provide consent for the team to contact them about it.

We are starting with building a rules engine so that we can create rules and then we will gradually add support for actions, such as prompting about eligibility for clinical trials, medication reviews, and automatically adding care plans to records.

What are we building?

We are currently building the rules engine that will match patients, based on SNOMED CT codes in their record. After this, we will focus on implementing the UI workflows for actions that patients can be prompted to take.

The first milestone for this project is letting organisations contact patients who are eligible for their clinical trials. After that we will expand the scope to include prompting patients to contact their organisation for a medication review or adding specific plans to records.

How are we rolling it out?

We can already do exploratory work with customers to indicate patient matches based on rules. This is being tested with pilot customers.

In terms of prompting patients from their record, we will start with a pilot project with one organisation running clinical trials. After that we will expand to other interested organisations. Please speak to your account manager if you are interested to learn more about this work.

Advanced questionnaires

Why is this a priority?

Organisations use online questionnaires as a quick and convenient way to communicate with and gather information from their patients. Organisations can send questionnaires to large groups of patients, for example to monitor waiting lists, or to individual patients, for example to assess them pre-operation. Improving questionnaires has been our most common customer request for the last few years.

Unregistered patients can answer a questionnaire before registration and will have the option to register once they’ve submitted their answers, so sending questionnaires can also increase registration rates.

This project moves our questionnaires to FHIR storage so it contributes to our migration to a FHIR native architecture.

What are we building?

• Questionnaires with an improved user experience and new features such as support for branching, scoring, capturing coded data, images.

  • Live since Q4 2023.

• Advanced questionnaires can be sent to registered and unregistered patients. Unregistered patients can register with NHS login after completing the questionnaire.

  • Live since Q3 2024.

• Questionnaires can be edited after submission

  • Live since Q4 2024.

  • Further work on this feature is currently being scoped.

• Patients can initiate a questionnaire via start consultation.

  • Currently working on this.

• Questionnaires can be sent to all patients in a team.

  • Q2 2025.

• Data from Questionnaires, e.g. coded scores, will be aggregated and stored in other parts of the patients record. This will allow us to ultimately show the data in other parts of the record or use it as part of our patient activation work.

  • Later

• Questionnaires can be completed by another user for the patient, e.g. carer.

  • Later

How are we rolling it out? 

Teams can move to advanced questionnaires now, once the features that they need have been developed.

You can read more about the Advanced Questionnaires roadmap and rollout in our wiki.

Roadmap

Sending SMS notifications

Why is this a priority?

PKB notifications have been limited to email. SMS has been a priority for organisations because they often have more verified phone numbers than email addresses for their patients. Organisations can thus reach more patients via SMS to increase their registration rates.

What are we building?

PKB will text patients encouraging them to register using NHS login when they get new data from their providers.

The SMS service is run through gov.notify and organisations can decide if they want to use this pathway for notifications. All patients will continue to get email notifications. 

How are we rolling it out? 

We added support for different phone number types so that we can store mobile phone numbers for patients to send SMS notifications to. 

Now we are focusing on sending an SMS to prompt a patient to register when they receive new referral letters. After that, we will send SMS notifications about new questionnaires. The order of work after that is currently being determined.

Roadmap

NHS App Wales

Why is this a priority?

Over 50% of our users are logging in to PKB via the NHS App. NHS App is being used by 31 million people in England and so it’s an important route for patients to access their PKB record. We want to continue working with the NHS App in other parts of the UK.

What are we building?

Patients will be able to navigate to their PKB record from the NHS App Wales. They can log in via NHS login.

This work will also allow patients in Wales to log in to PKB via NHS login again.

How are we rolling it out? 

Once we have NHS login approval to go live, we will switch it on for a pilot organisation.

Roadmap

NHS App England

Why is this a priority?

The NHS App is working with acute NHS Trusts in England to enable patients to view their health data. Organisation can enable jump-off points from NHS App to allow patients to view their PKB record. They can also enable PKB for the Wayfinder programme, allowing patients to securely view summary details of their scheduled appointments within the NHS App. PKB is supporting the NHS Apps work to ensure that patients accessing PKB from the NHS App will have an optimal user experience.

What are we building?

For the Wayfinder programme:

• when a patient gets a new or updated appointment they will receive a message in the NHS app with an associated push notification, informing them of the appointment or update.

• appointments for patients from mental health organisations can be viewed via the Wayfinder screens

For organisations with PKB enabled in the NHS App:

• patients will get messages with associated push notifications in the NHS App when they have a new message, document or questionnaire in PKB. The contents of the NHS App message will link them to their PKB record.

How are we rolling it out? 

As each feature is ready, it will be trialled with one organisation before being made generally available.

Roadmap

FHIR APIs

Why is this a priority?

In order to achieve our mission of providing all patients with a copy of their data, PKB needs full interoperability to enable partners and users to exchange data. Our strategy to achieve this is to standardise on FHIR APIs.

What are we building?

Organisations can already send their data as FHIR Resources to PKB. We are transitioning our system to a FHIR-native architecture, one datatype at a time. Once we have mapped, migrated and aggregated a data type it is available to view in our web application and our read-only FHIR API. 

At the start of this year, we are filling in gaps around patient creation and retrieval that will allow our FHIR API customers to streamline their development process so that they do not need to use other PKB APIs to send and retrieve their patients' data via FHIR.

We are making it possible to:

• create a patient in the aggregated FHIR store (won’t be available in PKB UI in this phase)

• add a patient to team in the aggregated FHIR store (won’t be available in PKB UI in this phase)

• retrieve a patient (or carer)

How are we rolling it out? 

We will work on these features one at a time to all customers.

Roadmap

Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Why is this a priority?

We want organisations and patients to be able to access their data via our APIs. To do this, we need to authenticate and authorise their usage.

This work enables us to support scenarios that have been requested by users for a long time, e.g. various multi-factor authentication options, integration with other authentication systems like Active Directory, allowing multiple roles for the same person. Thus, it makes it easier for us to integrate with products that patients are already using to manage their health.

What are we building?

• Granular access control, e.g. patients can allow an app to have read-only access to certain data only

• Multiple user roles

• Improve multi-factor authentication (MFA) options

How are we rolling it out? 

We will be working this project iteratively. Organisation-level access to data is already available. Now we are focusing on patient-level access to their own data.

Roadmap

Feature improvements

Throughout the year, we will continue to make minor improvements to the user interface for patients and professionals. These changes are planned regularly so we only plan three months ahead.

What are we currently working on? 

Plans

We are currently whitelisting additional HTML tags that customers would like to include in their plan templates.

Email notifications

We are aware that patients are receiving email notifications about profile updates when there has been no meaningful change. Have reviewed options, we are going to switch off these profile email notifications temporarily. We have been building a new notification service as part of our FHIR data migration and will re-implement demographic notifications later in that project.

Data management

Organisations data quality teams will be able to delete erroneous data reported by patients via the UI. Previously, if the data was sent via their APIs then this was the only route for correction.

Roadmap

Platform maintenance

We dedicate engineering resources to platform maintenance to ensure the stability and reliability of our services. This includes ongoing updates, optimisations, and enhancements to our infrastructure to provide a seamless user experience. One goal that we are working towards is being able to release new versions of Patients Know Best without downtime for users and API customers. Additionally, we are prioritising security measures to safeguard our platform and protect user data from potential threats and vulnerabilities.