An illustration of consumer Appointment Management sessions

The Appointment Management consumer application makes use of individual API calls described in ‘API use cases’ to perform business processes.

Consumer session - booking an appointment

The sequence diagram below illustrates which individual API calls are required by a consumer to book an appointment at a GP practice in the simplest case. It describes interactions of the consumer with the provider FHIR endpoint at the practice, and does not include details of the prerequisite interactions with Spine services. See Spine integration illustrated for details of an end-to-end appointment booking scenario with Spine service interactions included.

Step	Description
1a	Consumer makes an API call to Search for free slots at the practice in the specified time frame.
1b	Provider responds with details of what slots are available for booking. Should no applicable slots be returned, the consumer may make repeated calls to Search for free slots with amended date ranges.
2a	Consumer then makes API call to Find a patient providing the patient’s NHS Number.
2b	Provider finds patient record and returns the logical identifier of the patient record at this practice in their system. See Patient record not present for an illustration of the steps required in this case.
3a	Consumer calls Book an appointment indicating the slots selected in the UI together with the logical ID of the patient.
3b	Provider responds with details of the booked appointment as confirmation of success.

Consumer session - booking an appointment at a collection of federating practices

Where a consumer user interface provides a view of available bookings across a collection of federating practices, some steps are repeated for each practice, as shown below:

Step	Description
	Repeat step 1 for each federated practice to gain a view of slot availability across the federation
1a	Consumer makes an API call to Search for free slots at the practice in the specified time frame.
1b	Provider responds with details of what slots are available for booking. Should no applicable slots be returned, the consumer may make repeated calls to Search for free slots with amended date ranges.
2a	Consumer then makes API call to Find a patient providing the patient’s NHS Number.
2b	Provider finds patient record and returns the logical identifier of the patient record at this practice in their system. See Patient record not present for an illustration of the steps required in this case.
3a	Consumer calls Book an appointment indicating the slots selected in the UI together with the logical ID of the patient.
3b	Provider responds with details of the booked appointment as confirmation of success.

Consumer session - booking an appointment - no patient record

Step	Description
1a	Consumer makes an API call to Search for free slots at the practice in the specified time frame.
1b	Provider responds with details of what slots are available for booking. Should no applicable slots be returned, the consumer may make repeated calls to Search for free slots with amended date ranges.
2a	Consumer then makes API call to Find a patient providing the patient’s NHS Number.
2b	Provider returns zero patient records indicating that the patient with the specified NHS Number does not have a patient record at the practice.
3a	Consumer makes API call to Register a patient providing sufficient details to make a temporary registration at the practice.
3b	Provider returns the details of the temporarily registered patient, including the logical ID of the new patient record at the practice system, as confirmation of success.
4a	Consumer calls Book an appointment indicating the slots selected in the UI together with the logical ID of the newly created patient record at the practice.
4b	Provider responds with details of the booked appointment as confirmation of success.