Booking and Referral Standard

There are several benefits that BaRS offers healthcare professionals. They receive clinical information about patients in their care, at the point of need. This enables the healthcare professional to take the next appropriate action.

They can assess patients without asking them to repeat information unnecessarily. It also facilitates informed clinical decision making and improves time to treatment. Together, this improves outcomes for patients.

They can send and receive booking and referral information that is integrated into existing healthcare IT systems. This avoids working across two or more applications or systems improving productivity and clinical safety.

By implementing BaRS, IT suppliers will find it easier and more efficient to implement a single, agreed national interoperability standard for appointments and referrals, rather than supporting the existing multiple standards in operation.

For healthcare providers, BaRS integrates referral and booking information directly into the systems they use. This can help free up capacity and reduce waiting times for patients. It means different types of healthcare providers have the digital capability to work together to provide a single patient journey.

BaRS supports commissioners and ICSs to easily integrate care journeys across care settings using existing systems.

BaRS supports patients to be referred to and, where appropriate, booked into a healthcare service which provides the right care, in the right place at the right time, safely and easily. This helps to improve patient experience.

The transport layer, referred to as BaRS Core, defines a standardised way for two systems to talk to each other and all systems will implement this layer consistently.

The workflow layer allows a specific BaRS compliant solution to support a particular patient journey. Workflows are described in a standardised way. Each workflow uses a combination of standard operations, defined in the transport layer. This combination creates a sequence that meets the requirements of the patient journey.

The payload layer provides the information required for the receiving system to complete or deliver the intended service or task that is being requested. The information is communicated as a collection of FHIR resources.