PFS Appointments

Design Overview

Purpose

To meet strategic objectives to improve access to GP care, the PFS Appointment Management API enables patients (via a consumer application) to book and manage GP practice appointments held in any of the four GP principal practice systems. The implementation of non-patient access is out of scope for this deployment, and is covered by the GP Connect Appointments API. Some API specification items may be uplifted in the future to reflect the requirements identified by related Appointment Management initiatives within the GP IT and Interoperability domains.

Example scenarios

• a patient can book, view or cancel appointments.

GP practice appointment slot availability

GP practices need to control access by external organisations to their appointment book. Provider systems will enable practice users to designate their schedules/slots as bookable by PFS Appointments, ensuring that only slots available for direct patient booking are returned in response to a request.

The Appointment slots available via PFS Appointments will also be categorised by the end-user according to standardised values representing the role of the practitioner delivering the appointment, and the channel by which the appointment is to be delivered - for example, 'telephone', 'in-person'. This provides more information to the patient booking the appointment, thereby reducing the risk of inappropriate appointment booking. The requirements are described in more detail in the Slot availability management page.

First of Type (FoT) care setting deployments

The following FoT deployments are being progressed:

Care Setting 1: Within GP federations

Enabling a patient to book, view or cancel in-hours or extended hours appointments at the patient’s registered GP practice or another GP practice within the same Federation.

API definition

The following individual API calls are used by consumers to implement the Appointment Management capability:

• Retrieve a patient's appointments
• Search for free slots
• Read an appointment
• Book an appointment
• Cancel an appointment

Examples of consumer Appointment Management sessions

The use of the individual API calls listed above by consumers to fulfil business processes is illustrated with focus on the booking of an appointment. See Appointment Management consumer sessions illustrated.

Profiled FHIR resources

See the Appointment Management FHIR® resources page for details of the FHIR profiles used for the Appointment Management capability pack.

Spine interactions

The Appointment Management capability message set includes the following set of Spine interactions:

Implementation and testing

Below is the suggested order in which the appointment capabilities should be implemented as a provider supplier. The specified order has been recommended around the functionality of the GP Connect Automated Test Suite and any internal dependencies between the test scenarios for the different Appointment Management endpoints. The Appointment Management capability test scenarios are dependent on the foundation capabilities and therefore the foundation endpoints should be developed and tested before implementing the Appointment Management capabilities.

It’s recommended that you develop against the Automated Test Suite as this will help with creating a GP Connect compliant product. By implementing the endpoints in the order below, the Automated Test Suite set of tests for that endpoint can be run during development without you seeing errors due to pre-test API calls or post-test validation API calls relevant to the test being run and failing as they have not been developed yet.