Known issues related to the Appointment Management capability

Organization resource in Search for free slots returned Bundle

A business requirement to include Organization was listed in a previous version of Search for free slots, without the corresponding FHIR request parameter to allow the resource to be returned in the Bundle (according to the FHIR rules for inclusion).

At the current time consumer systems are using this Organization resource in their appointment booking products and so this resource cannot immediately be removed from the Bundle.

In order to ensure the known issue does not cause problems for providers or consumers, and to support a transition to fixing the issue, the following requirements apply for the current time:

• Provider systems SHALL continue to return the Organization resource in the Search for free slots Bundle, except where no matching Slot resources were found.

• Provider systems SHALL accept the _include:recurse=Location:managingOrganization parameter in the Search for free slots request without returning an error, however SHALL continue to return the Organization resource regardless of whether this parameter is present.

• Consumer systems SHALL send the _include:recurse=Location:managingOrganization parameter, IF they require corresponding Organization resources to be returned in the Bundle.

Important: In a future version of GP Connect API, Organization resources will only be returned where the _include:recurse=Location:managingOrganization parameter is passed by consumers, therefore consumers shall pass this parameter if they require the Organisation resource to continue to be returned as part of their Search for free slots response.

Consumer sent patient temporary contact details when booking an appointment

It is recognised that a consumer may wish to send temporary contact details for a patient at the point an appointment is booked.

At the present time, temporary contact details can only be sent by the consumer in the Register patient message which is used to create a patient record at the provider organisation where a record for the patient doesn’t already exist. Furthermore there is no corresponding “update patient demographics” message to subsequently add temporary contact details.

Therefore there is a known discrepancy in when a consumer may send temporary contact details for a patient - when a patient record is created on the provider system, but not when one already exists.

A solution to this is being considered, however as a temporary workaround, consumer organisations MAY send temporary contact details in the text description field of the Appointment resource in Book appointment or Amend appointment however if doing so consumers must be aware this field is written to a text field stored against the booked appointment in the provider systems appointment book, and will not be saved in the usual place in the demographic record that contact details are normally stored.