National Events Management Service - FHIR API

Use this API to publish and subscribe to patient-centric healthcare event messages with the National Events Management Service (NEMS).  This national service is implemented on the NHS Spine.

As a sending system, you can:

• publish an event message

As a subscribing system, you can:

• create a subscription
• read a subscription 
• delete a subscription

This API uses a publish-subscribe model - the sending system publishes specific range of healthcare event messages to National Events Management Service (NEMS), and NEMS forwards the events to all subscribed systems via MESH.

NEMS authorises a specific list of system suppliers and health and social care organisations to publish information as events.

For more details, see the Introduction to the National Events Management Service.

This API 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 healthcare events, see the NEMS controller catalogue.

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

The following APIs are related to this API :

• Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) API - use this to collect event messages that you subscribed to
• National Record Locator - FHIR API - use this to find and retrieve published information, which might have been sent via a NEMS event message prior to your subscription

A number of other integrations use NEMS as a publish-subscribe event mechanism. For a full list, see our API catalogue, filtered on NEMS.

This API is in production.

This API 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 API is a publish-subscribe event API .

All endpoints use FHIR, specifically FHIR STU3, and:

• the subscription endpoints use RESTful FHIR 
• the publish endpoint uses FHIR messaging

To collect events that you have subscribed to, use our MESH API.

The message payload is also FHIR - the same format as used by the sending system.

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

For more details see Network access for APIs.

This API is application-restricted, meaning the calling application is authenticated but the end user is either not authenticated or not present.

In particular, this API uses TLS-MA authentication.

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

For more details, see application-restricted APIs.

NEMS is also 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.

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

As part of this process, you need to demonstrate that you can manage risks and that your software conforms technically with the requirements for this API. This might impact the design of your software. For details, see NEMS FHIR API onboarding support information.

To understand how our online digital onboarding process works, see digital onboarding.

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

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