What is the “Booking Standard”
This section will provide a brief overview of the Standard for commissioners involved in appointing services, aiming to integrate the experience of care by supporting both patients and organisations running services.
The NHS Booking and Referrals Programme provides a Standard for system suppliers to develop booking functionality against. When software suppliers adopt interoperable booking functionality, whether to offer slots (Providers), make bookings (Consumers) or both, they are connecting services togethers; a patient who calls one service is made known to another through the act of a booking being made on their behalf. The aim is to drive standardisation for booking interoperability, enabling all systems who build to the Standard and enabling them to interact without any prior knowledge of each other, removing explicit point-to-point configuration.
Integrating care in this way supports services to provide joined up care at scale. Systems which implement the Booking Standard could book with any other system in the country, which has built to the Standard, and it is being increasingly adopted within the UEC space. A full list of conformant system suppliers can be found here.
Implementations
Recently the Standard was adopted by suppliers to support the 111 First aim of 111 service providers booking patients into Emergency Departments, to avoid them turning up unannounced and overwhelming services during an unprecedented period in the history of the NHS; the COVID Pandemic. This demonstrates how systems adopting the Standard can drive process and how services (111 and EDs) can collaborate to provide an improved patient experience of joined up care.
Benefits
A patient’s journey is improved when services incorporate booking functionality. When a patient makes contact with one service, who after initial assessment of their needs, decides to refer them to a different service, the act of making a booking for them helps bridge the gap between the two. The receiving service will not only hold the booking but a summary of care to-date, packaged as supporting clinical information (a requirement of the Booking Standard), to help ensure the next step in the patient journey transitions as smoothly as possible. The ambition being for the patient to feel central and services to know about them as they move between them.
Collaboration between services is enabled through adoption of the Booking Standard too. Services will know upfront the patients they can expect to make contact and have the booking and supporting clinical information available. Additionally, they can manage their capacity more effectively by offering or limiting available slots for the services they are running, advertising this to other services looking to consume their resource. This helps the service stop being overwhelmed and reduces a patient’s wait time by sending them to service with sufficient capacity.
Monitoring
Service activity can be monitored through a suggested suite of reports. System suppliers may also include additional reporting to suit service provider needs.
If there is any particular metric not included as default but required to assist with continued commissioning of a service, we would happy to consider reviewing and expanding requirements around Monitoring, Analytics and Reporting.
If you have any questions please contact the Booking team at: bookingandreferrals@nhs.net