2. National Event Management Service (NEMS)

The National Events Management Service (NEMS) is a national service implemented on the Spine and allows for patient-centric event messages to be published from one system and distributed to a number of other subscriber systems. 

The NEMS is designed to be a generic transport mechanism which can support a variety of use cases and event types from several different care settings.

Event messages are intended to be generic (for example Person Demographic service (PDS) events, such as birth, death) and for use in multiple care settings, however it is recognised that there may be some which are specific to a care setting.

Further detail on NEMS can be found on the Health Developer Network and the National Events Management Service.

For Health and Social Care Professionals who have a legitimate relationship with the patient or service user, the National Event Management Service is an event management brokerage service that facilitates the sharing of nationally defined patient or service user events between approved health and care organisations (an organisation which has completed the NHS Digital interoperability working group and a recommendation that the use of NEMS best meets the user needs), services, care-settings, professionals and patients  or service users in near-real time and for direct care purposes. 

Unlike the current systems and manual processes, the National Event Management Service enables the flow of data automatically across organisational and service boundaries in a consistent, standardised format in near-real time.  Access to the data is securely managed and controlled and the solution underpins the delivery of national strategies and the provision of digital interoperability capabilities to the health and social care ecosystem.

Where an application requires access to data captured and held on another application, there are 5 general patterns for managing this, all patterns are supported by NHS Digital.

The National Event Management Service adopts a publish or subscribe interoperability pattern, which means that an application that captures data publishes this to other applications referred to as subscribers.  Key characteristics of a publish or subscribe pattern are:

• those generating the information do not typically know all those who should receive it
• those receiving the information do not typically know who produced it
• the recipient(s) need to be informed that an event has occurred and can't wait until they next access the patient's record

As the National Event Management Service is a data-sharing capability, governance and assurance controls exist to ensure that only eligible health and social care organisations wishing to publish or subscribe to NEMS are approved to do so. 

These controls ensure that information sharing requests are in-keeping with NHS Digital’s information governance requirements and the DIP Direction.

Requests to publish or subscribe to existing events or to share new or changed ‘information flows are managed through the Interoperability Working group and are triggered by the submission of an information flow request form section 4.2 .These are available by emailing [email protected]t.

The term information flow is used to delineate between the initial request to share information and the IWG’s recommended architectural pattern for example event (and there NEMS) or record pointer (and therefore the National Record Locator (NRL)).

The NEMS principles are as follows:

• genericity of events is maintained where possible to support reuse across eligible health and social care systems
• new or changed requests to share information are fit for use and fit for purpose by users

The use of NEMS:

• • aligns to the architectural principles
  • is underpinned by the appropriate information governance artefacts
  • supports clinical safety
  • is for direct care purposes

The pre-requisites are contained in detail in the Supplier Conformance Assessment List (SCAL), as are the business requirements, however key items have been summarised here to help connecting parties identify potential showstoppers at an early stage.

Technical 

1, PDS compliancy.  For information about searching using demographic information.

2. Penetration testing. 

3. A valid ODS (Organisation Data Service) code is required for the connecting party). The ODS Portal indicates if an organisation has a registered code.

4. N3 or HSCN connection. This is required for both live service and the online testing process.

5. A valid NHS Smartcard for all users or a system that uses an authentication method supported by NHS Identity or NHS Login. Learn more about Smartcards, 

Information governance 

An organisation must have completed the DSPT (Data Security Protection Toolkit) within the last 12 months. 

Clinical Safety

Connecting parties must have an appointed clinical safety officer and undertake a clinical safety assessment prior to going live. Both the connecting party and the end user organisation working as a publisher and/or consumer will need to evidence clinical safety assessment has been completed and Hazard log reviewed through the completion of SCAL.

Based on the type of use case being onboarded, any additional requirements to the above process will be identified and advised by the onboarding team.