BJSS has been selected to develop the NHS e-Referral Service. The NHS e-Referral Service will succeed the existing Choose and Book service, in use across the NHS in England, and is being developed to support the drive toward paperless referrals and a paperless NHS by 2018.

Handling more than 40 million referrals across its lifetime, Choose and Book is an online referral and appointment booking system that enables NHS professionals and patients to select their preferred healthcare provider, date, time and confirm an appointment.

Within the scope of the initial phase of software development are a number of key activities:

  • The existing Choose and Book functionality will be replicated to support the transition to the new NHS e-Referral Service.
  • Removal of the ‘vendor lock in’ to current proprietary software within the Choose and Book platform will enable greater flexibility in future and significant reductions in operating costs.
  • Key changes also include expanding the capability to support additional professional users of the NHS e-Referral Service within the NHS and NHS partners, as well as a set of ‘Application Programming Interfaces’, which will ensure the NHS e-Referral Service can more effectively integrate with other systems for the benefit of professional users and patients.

The initial phase of e-RS development will provide the platform to deliver a range of new features and functionality in support of professional users and patients, which is in line with the NHS e-Referral Service vision.

The development of the new NHS e-Referral Service will follow the proven BJSS Enterprise Agile approach and will see the reliance on proprietary software being replaced with an open flexible platform that can easily integrate with other systems and be hosted on commodity infrastructure.

Mike Buck, BJSS Public Sector Practice Lead, comments: “We’re really pleased to have been selected to work with HSCIC on another high-profile project. We will be working closely with the NHS team to deliver a cost-effective solution using Open Source and Agile Techniques.”