Building healthcare software - vaccinations

This software development kit (SDK) is a non-technical guide aimed at people who want to interact with the Immunisation FHIR® API.

It explains how to build software that captures and submits records of section 7A vaccinations to NHS England. Guidance is provided for those who have a clinical use to view patient vaccination history records to support direct care within the NHS in England.

Vaccinations included under the terms of section 7A of the National Health Services Act are defined annually in the NHS public health functions agreement.

The following topics are covered:

• a high level overview of current and upcoming capabilities and features (coming soon)
• an API solution overview describing immunisation FHIR API (coming soon)

• API user guidance

• patterns of interacting with the API (coming soon)

• Coding for vaccination disease types

• Testing

• DOS onboarding
• Solution and clinical assurance
• Onboarding disease types and vaccines

This software development kit (SDK) provides information for both new and existing consumers of NHS vaccination data, as follows:

• new consumers: the SDK provides a clear roadmap offering step-by-step instructions, ensuring that no steps are missed. The aim is to reduce consumer confusion to help new development teams feel more confident as they gain familiarity with the Immunisation FHIR API
• existing consumers: the SDK can help streamline tasks and improve efficiency by following established patterns. Experienced consumers can avoid unnecessary steps or errors, helping to maintain consistency and ensuring tasks are always performed in the same way

The documentation is aimed at people who want to interact with the Immunisation FHIR API including:

• programme and product management
• business architects and analyst
• technical architects and leads
• solution assurance and testing
• clinical assurance
• technical leads and developers

This Immunisation FHIR API (SDK) contains documentation for two of the three applications that make up the end-to-end process.

In scope

• the immunisation FHIR API component for reading and writing disease type agnostic vaccination events
• the immunisation FHIR API batch component for transferring multiple disease type agnostic vaccination events at the same time in a batch file

Out of scope

• the immunisation FHIR API synchronisation component for onward distribution of vaccination records via our Data Platform Services (DPS)

The Immunisation FHIR API replaces the batch submission of vaccination records described in the Vaccinations API page.