e-Referral Service in United Kingdom

National Health Service (NHS) & the e-Referral Service in United Kingdom

The Choose and Book system gives the patient the opportunity to book an appointment at a hospital or clinic either when the patient is at the general practitioners office or the patient can book and/or change the appointment later. Choose and Book is a nationwide system and can be used for booking appointments at any hospital funded by the NHS. It is also possible for the patient to check the status of the booking. It took two years to get the first million referrals through the system, but in less than a year another 4 million referrals were through the system. According to the NHS, 15,070 referrals were sent daily in October 2007, representing 45 percent of the NHS referral activity from GPs to specialist care.

e-Referral Service & update Choose and Book System

• The replacement service has been rewritten and re-developed and should be the same from a functional perspective of Choose and Book compliant systems.
• Launched vision at Commissioning Show June 2013
• NHS e-RS to succeed Choose and Book and support paperless referrals and paperless NHS objectives
• Initial phase software development procurement completed, contract awarded to BJSS in July, completion in 2014
• Approvals obtained and in progress to support rapid procurement of replacement services:
  • Infrastructure and Managed Hosting
  • The Appointment Line
  • Software support
  • Future Development
• NHS e-RS remains a priority for the Secretary of State, NHS England, Beverley Bryant (NHS e-RS Programme SRO), HSCIC and DH.

Architecture Principles

• Develop solution based on Open Source technology products which
• are well-known, proven, widely used and adequately supported
• Implement loose-coupling and separation
• Adopt open standards where possible
• Re-use components where practical
• Design and develop the solution for:
  • Multi-channel consumption
  • Security
  • Operational simplicity
  • Flexible scaling
  • Resilience
• Adoption of NHS Data Standards as appropriate (e.g. NHS Number)

Key features of NHS e-Referral Service

The Patient Booking Website is known as the NHS e-Referral Service

• It is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
• It is a secure booking website, that meets national and international standards for holding and transferring information electronically.
• You can make, change, or cancel your appointments
• Allows you to change your password
• Select alternative language support
• Lets you increase the font size on the screen
• Has a Help function to support patients

Maryam Ghalandari