NHS Wayfinder Services Data Provision Notice

The purpose of the NHS Wayfinder Service is to develop and deliver a solution that enables people to access additional information from NHS Trusts about their elective care such as referrals, appointments, documents, questionnaires, test results, and wait times for care via the NHS account and its associated citizen-facing delivery channels such as the NHS App and NHS website.

The main driver for this capability is the growing elective care waiting list and the need to keep people informed and empowered to manage their elective care pathway.

The Wayfinder programme will focus to expand and enhance patient-facing systems (in the first two phases, Patient Engagement Platforms (PEPs) specifically) and look to integrate them with the NHS App to provide more patient-centred care at local and national levels.

Wayfinder will build a bridge between patient-facing systems and the NHS App through the development of a patient care aggregator (the “aggregator”) to collate and surface information via API from patient-facing systems and a management integration layer to link patient-facing systems with the NHS App.

This will realise the following ambitions:

• to create a more consistent user experience which increases accessibility, visibility and control for people on elective pathways through a single point of entry
• to expand the number of people making use of the benefits of Patient-Facing Systems by using the NHS App as a front door
• to present curated local information, contact details and guidance in the NHS App for people on elective care pathways

Under section 259(1)(a) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, this Notice is served in accordance with the procedure published as part of the NHS England duty under section 259(8) on the following persons:

• NHS trusts which have a patient-facing system that has onboarded to Wayfinder

Under section 259(5) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 the organisation types specified above must comply with the Form, Manner and Period requirements below.

National Data Opt Out would apply to Wayfinder if personal data were to be shared. However, no personally identifiable data will be shared or disseminated by Wayfinder. Only aggregated (anonymous) summary data will be shared or disseminated.

This is an ongoing data collection for those trusts with patient-facing systems that have onboarded to Wayfinder and are “live” with the relevant feature.  

The collection start date for other trusts will be as follows: 

• NHS Numbers – the later of the following two dates: (i) the publication date for the NHS Wayfinder Services Direction 2023 or (ii) the date the trust goes live with a PEP that has onboarded to Wayfinder 
• appointment metadata – the date the trust goes live with this feature on their patient-facing system that has onboarded to Wayfinder 
• document metadata – the date the trust goes live with this feature on their patient-facing system that has onboarded to Wayfinder 
• Questionnaire metadata – the date the trust goes live with this feature on their patient-facing system that has onboarded to Wayfinder 
• Data for management information (at an aggregate and individual patient level) – the date the trust goes live with this feature on their patient-facing system

Submissions are handled automatically by the patient-facing systems that have onboarded to Wayfinder. Submissions are generally in real-time, with the exception of management information that can be supplied monthly or in real-time.