Advanced Questionnaires development plan
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 stage, teams who send questionnaires only via integration (and not via the user interface) can begin using advanced questionnaires. Patients will not see the questionnaire in their PKB record and can only respond to the questionnaire via the email notification.
Q1 2024
Patients can see questionnaires on the Events & messages page (Complete)
Patients will now see questionnaire requests on the Events & messages page. From here, the patient can answer the questions in the questionnaire, continue answering questions on a questionnaire they’ve saved or view their answers to completed questionnaires.
Other users with the required access, such as professionals and carers, cannot answer questions on behalf of a patient but can view their answers.
At this stage, teams can send questionnaires to patients via integration and patients can respond to the questionnaire from the UI. This means that teams that intend to send advanced questionnaires only using an integration can begin using advanced questionnaires.
Q2 2024
Professionals and coordinators can send questionnaires and export responses via the UI
The stage stage of development is to allow professionals and coordinators to send questionnaires to patients from the UI. This is the stage that we will begin to move teams over to advanced questionnaires.
The ‘Consultations’ tab on in the professional and coordinator UI will change to ‘Questionnaires’ and the ‘Start consultation’ button will change to ‘Start questionnaire’. This will change for all teams, even those who have not moved to advanced questionnaires.
Professionals and coordinators will be able to send questionnaires to patients via the PKB UI by clicking ‘Send questionnaire’. Patients will get an email notification asking them to complete the questionnaire and will see the questionnaire request in the Events & messages section.
There will be two ways for professionals and coordinators to send advanced questionnaires:
Professionals and coordinators can send a questionnaire to every patient in their team at once. The sender will not be notified when each patient completes the questionnaire.
Professionals can send a questionnaire to an individual patient. The sender will be notified when the patient completes the questionnaire.
We will move teams to advanced questionnaires in batches. Once a team has moved:
Professionals can only send advanced questionnaires via the UI. They cannot send the consultations that they were sending before the move. PKB will rebuild these as advanced questionnaires.
Patients can not initiate questionnaires via the UI. These patients will not see the ‘Start consultation’ button until we allow the patient to initiate the questionnaire via the UI, unless they are also in teams that have not moved to advanced questionnaires.
Professionals and coordinators can export responses to advanced questionnaires and historical consultation responses from before the move.
New teams and existing teams with no questionnaire templates will automatically move to advanced questionnaires.
At this stage, teams that do not need the patient to initiate questionnaires via the UI can move to advanced questionnaires.
Later
Questionnaires can be completed by professionals and carers
Professionals and carers will then have the option of completing questionnaires on behalf of patients, as well as, where appropriate, those that patients have completed. This will allow professionals to update the answers after reviewing them with the patient. This feature will be configurable, so teams can decide which questionnaires can be amended.
Patients can initiate questionnaires via the UI
Teams will be able to configure whether patients can initiate questionnaires via the UI. Patients will initiate these questionnaires by clicking ‘Start consultation’.
The button will remain ‘Start consultation’, as the patient is consulting their team online when they choose to initiate a questionnaire.
Patients will then only be able to initiate advanced questionnaires via the user interface. All teams that have patient-initiated questionnaire workflows will be moved to advanced questionnaires at this point.
At this stage, teams that have workflows that require the patient to initiate a questionnaire can move to advanced questionnaires.
Future work (Unscheduled)
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 patients and professionals to send secure messages about an Advanced Questionnaire
Can my team 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 your team sends consultations to patients via the user interface (UI) now, you can keep sending these via the UI until we move your team to advanced questionnaires.