Digital Child Health - FHIR

Use this integration to share information about a child's health between healthcare workers.

This information is recorded throughout a child's clinical pathway or patient journey about:

• health events
• clinical contacts 

These events or contacts happen either as part of:

• a planned Healthy Child Programme
• unplanned GP or Emergency Department visits

Examples of such events include creating, updating or deleting a record of a:

• blood spot test outcome
• newborn hearing test
• Newborn and Infant Physical Examination (NIPE) outcome

This integration uses a publish-subscribe model - the sending system publishes events to National Events Management Service (NEMS), and NEMS forwards the events to all subscribed systems via MESH.

Subscribed systems might be GPs, emergency departments, local authorities or some other care provider. Potentially, patients and carers could also share this information.

For more information see Digital Child Health specification versions.

Before you begin any development work using this integration, contact us to discuss your best options.

This integration can only be used where there is a legal basis to do so.

Make sure you have a valid use case before you go too far with your development. To do this, contact us. 

For details of the legal basis for sharing NEMS events, see the NEMS controller catalogue.

You must do this before you can go live (see 'Onboarding' below).

The following APIs and integrations are also related to this one:

• National Events Management Service (NEMS) - use this to publish and subscribe to patient-centric event messages

• Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) API - use this to collect events that you have subscribed to

• Child Protection - Information Sharing - HL7 V3 API - use this to access child protection information from Child Protection - Information Sharing (CP-IS) as a local authority or an unscheduled care provider using our HL7 V3 API

This integration is in production.

This integration is a bronze service, meaning it is operational and supported only during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

This integration uses FHIR.

It uses a publish-subscribe model and is specifically based on the HL7 FHIR STU3 Messaging Implementation.

Use our National Events Management Service (NEMS) integration to subscribe to events.

Use our MESH API to collect event messages that you have subscribed to.

For more details, see FHIR.

This integration is available on the internet and on the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN).

For more details see Network access for APIs.

This integration uses NEMS and the MESH API which are application-restricted, meaning we authenticate the calling application but not the end user.

You can use this pattern as follows:

• unattended (end user not present), for example as part of a back end process to check NHS numbers for data flowing from one system to another

• attended (end user present) - in which case, you must ensure the end user is authenticated and suitably authorised locally by the calling application

In particular, this integration uses TLS-MA authentication.

It also implements authorisation controls which restrict the event types that the connecting application can subscribe to or publish.

For more details, see application-restricted APIs.

This integration uses NEMS, which is available for testing purposes in:

• development (DEV)

• integration (INT)

• deployment (DEP)

The base URLs are as follows:

The  base URL for the publishing and subscribing interactions are the same, but the path is different, for example:

• publish in integration over HSCN:
  https://msg.int.spine2.ncrs.nhs.uk/STU3/Events/1/$process-message
• subscribe in integration over HSCN:
  https://msg.int.spine2.ncrs.nhs.uk/STU3/Subscription
• publish in integration over the internet:
  https://msg.intspineservices.nhs.uk/STU3/Events/1/$process-message
• subscribe in integration over the internet:
  https://msg.intspineservices.nhs.uk/STU3/Subscription

There is a testing tool which allows you to simulate a provider publishing event messages. You can also simulate making changes on PDS to trigger PDS-published event messages so you can test event message consumption.

To get advice on how to begin testing, contact us.

For more details, see the NEMS onboarding guide on getting access to the integration (INT) test environment.

You need to get your software approved by us before it can go live with this integration. We call this onboarding. The onboarding process can sometimes be quite long, so it’s worth planning well ahead.

To outline your use case and start the onboarding process for this integration, contact us.

This integration uses the following MESH workflow IDs:

• BLOODSPOTTESTOUTCOME_1
• NEWBORNHEARING_1
• NIPEOUTCOME_1

For a full list of interactions for this integration, see Publish an Event Message and Subscriptions Overview.

This integration supports the following event types:

• Blood Spot Test Outcome
• Newborn Hearing
• NIPE Outcome
• Professional Contacts
• Vaccinations

For details on the general structure of the interactions, see FHIR.