Choose and Book (C&B) is one of the services offered by the English National Programme for IT (NPfIT). C&B is also refered to as the e-Booking Service, or eBS, as it allows General Practitioners (GPs) to make outpatient appointments in hospitals across the country online.

The e-Booking Service polls each connected hospital at regular intervals for available appointment slots. GPs use the web front-end for making appointments. The service then talks to individual patient administration systems on their behalf via the Spine, the NPfIT messaging infrastructure. Conversely, the service must be notified if one of the previously published slots becomes unavailable, so that the slot server is kept up to date between polling cycles.

The Spine comprises data stores and the Transaction and Messaging Spine (TMS). The TMS is built on top of an ebXML Message Service Handler and routes HL7 version 3 messages between Spine-connected systems.
Systems participating in the eBS must implement the appropriate HL7 messages in order to interface with the eBS back-end, as well as interfacing with some of the Spine data store services, notably the Patient Demographic Service (PDS) and the Spine Directory Service (SDS). The former serves demographic information for NHS patients and is accessible via ebXML messaging, the latter contains the NHS LDAP directory.

UltraGenda Pro is the UltraGenda hospital appointment and scheduling system. A new add-on was developed for eBS compliance.

Medical records are not exchanged between the Spine and patient administration systems. Even so, access to the Spine is highly sensitive and is only granted after delivering a series of rigorously reviewed milestones including system specifications, design, test plans, roll-out plans, information governance policies and test results from a system in a stubbed environment. Access for on-line testing and, ultimately, certification requires setting up a VPN to the NHS' N3 network.

The UltraGenda Pro add-on is implemented in C# on the .NET framework.

Reference: Etienne Maerien