After a bit of feedback.
Do suppliers and NHS Trusts follow these rules for these codes (taken from NHS Digital FHIR Implementation Guide).
It doesn’t appear to be new, I’ve followed them in several NHS (Secondary Care) Trusts mostly in HL7v2.
My suspicion is its the not been followed that rigidly (with the exception of GMP numbers) in GP systems.
And also (from NHS Digital FHIR Implementation Guide)
@mayfield.g.kev when you say ‘follow these rules’ do you mean strictly validate inputs against the Format specified?
If that’s the question, I suspect yes, your suspicion is probably correct, these will have been handled as unvalidated free text.
As with many things in healthcare that need to be better, that answer is not to produce more guidance but to produce useful libraries that do some of this for you as a developer. For example, if the above guidance came with example RegEx which would validate each of the types of entity, then I reckon it would be done more often. I’m not saying it’s hard to do, it’s just that everything you can do to make it easier increases ubiquity and standardisation. ‘Convention over configuration’ starts to take a hold.
Yes. The rule/guidance for GMC code is CONSULTANT CODE
and GMP GENERAL MEDICAL PRACTITIONER PPD CODE
I have found examples of this not being followed.
We probably will have a FHIR API this year for this but at the moment you access the codes via ODS Downloads.
econcur and egpcur from GP and GP practice related data - NHS Digital
The two earlier links do have regex checks that will be used to generate warnings (I think they need to generate errors)
