Illustration of the use of the Visitors and Migrants API showing all interactions required with Spine services.
Spine integration required to retrieve visitors and migrants chargeable status
The full details of the visitors and migrants APIs can be found in the Visitors and Migrants API Specification.
Consumers of the visitors and migrants API are required to integrate with the following Spine services as a pre-requisite to making API calls:
To illustrate this, an example is given below of all the steps required consume V&M data. For full details, please refer to the relevant spine service pages.
Example: Find a patient and retrieve their chargeable status
The following sequence diagram illustrates all the steps which a Consumer system would be required to undertake in order to query the Spine for the chargeable status of a patient:
The steps shown in the diagram are detailed below.
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Step 1 is optional in the sense that a cached version of a previous these trace results may be available to the consumer. | |
| 1a | Consumer is responsible for performing a Personal Demographics Service(PDS) Trace to both verify the NHS Number and confirm that they have the correct patient demograhic details. |
| 1b | PDS returns the verified NHS Number. |
| Step 2 is optional in the sense that cached endpoint details for the Spine FHIR endponit may be available from a previous SDS call. | |
| 2a | Consumer calls Spine Directory Service (SDS) to retrieve the FHIR endpoint URL. |
| 2b | SDS returns the MHS entry containing the FHIR endpoint URL. |
| 3a | Consumer then makes an API call to Search for Chargeable Status for the patient. |
| 3b | Spine returns the FHIR Observation that contains the chargeable status information. |