The NHS Number Lookup tool allows users to either verify a patient’s NHS number and contact information from the NHS Spine or find a patient’s NHS number if they do not know it. This tool increases the speed of adding new patients to your iaptus system, and helps find NHS numbers for registered patients. This reduces the risk of duplicate records and ensures the correct NHS number is entered for data quality and reporting purposes.
How does it work?
If enabled for your service, the NHS Number Lookup tool area allows you to pull information from the NHS Spine. We use a Spine Mini Service Provider (SMSP) to achieve this. By auto-populating some of the fields, it increases the speed of adding new patients, and ensures the correct NHS number is entered.
If you have the NHS number and date of birth for the patient, their contact details can be found using the Already have NHS number tab.
If you do not have the patient’s NHS number and date of birth, the Do not have NHS number tab can be used with other demographic details to find the patient’s NHS number.
The details will be verified and if successful, you will be presented with a table to select the fields that you would like to auto-populate.
The selected details will then be added to the new patient registration form.
Tip: Since iaptus uses an SMSP and is not directly spine connected, updates made to the spine will not be automatically pulled into iaptus. A spine lookup will need to be re-run manually in order to pull in any updates.
User Permissions
Once the feature has been enabled for your service a Superuser will be able to enable the Spine Lookup permission for each user’s account as appropriate. In the Users section of the Superuser menu once you have clicked on a user account, a checkbox called Spine Lookup can be ticked. Ensure the change is saved to enable the use of NHS Lookup.
Set-Up Process
Please raise a support log with your Mayden Account Manager if you wish to adopt this feature and they will be able to guide you through the process.