Digital Medicine - FHIR

Use this integration to notify a patient's registered GP practice about care services delivered at a pharmacy.

You can send notifications about:

• an immunisation given (in production but deprecated)

• an emergency medication dispensed without a prescription (in production but deprecated)

This integration uses MESH to send and receive messages.

The following use cases are now retired and you cannot use them:

• a minor illness referral consultation

• a medication review

• an appliance use review

• a New Medicine Service (NMS) appointment

For more details, see status.

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.

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

The following API is related to this integration:

• Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) API - use this API to transfer messages and large files securely across health and social care organisations

Additionally, use the following API standard to implement this integration:

• Interoperability Toolkit 3 Messaging Distribution FHIR API standards - use this API standard to implement a set of generic messaging components using HL7 FHIR STU3 to create a unified approach to NHS message and document flows across England

This integration is in production but deprecated.

This integration consists of six different notification types. The status of each message type is as follows:

If you would like to be involved in our beta programme, contact us.

This integration uses MESH which is a silver service, meaning it is operational 24 hours a day, 365 days a year but only supported during business hours (8am to 6pm), Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays.

For more details, see service levels.

This is an asynchronous messaging integration. The notifications take the form of FHIR STU3 messages sent via MESH.

For more details, see FHIR and MESH.

You can access this integration via:

• the Health and Social Care Network (HSCN)

• the internet

For more details, see Network access for APIs.

This integration uses MESH which is an application-restricted API.

The integration does not perform any end user authentication or authorisation checks. Rather, the calling system is expected to perform them. The authorisation rules are specified in our national Role Based Access Control (RBAC) database.

For more details see our national RBAC database on the registration authorities and smartcards page.

This integration uses MESH.

As a developer, you are most likely to want to connect to MESH using either the MESH client or the MESH API.

For more details about using the MESH client, see MESH client.

For the MESH API, there are several independent, externally accessible instances of MESH you can use for testing. For full details, see MESH API - Environments and testing.

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 onboard for this API, contact us.

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

The following versions are published: