Patient Registration Service - Maintenance Downtime

Published: 27/03/25

Our colleagues at NSS have let us know that there is planned downtime of the patient registration service from 6pm on Friday April 4th to 8am on Monday the 7th of April.

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What this means for pharmacy teams is:

1. The eligibility check for Pharmacy First will fail and the response status will be ‘Failed’ or ‘Unknown’ depending on the PMR; this won’t prevent the next stage of entering the data for a PFS Standard or PFS PGD claim but will require the user to confirm that they wish to continue. If this is a new patient and no record exists on the PMR, no CHI will be known due to the eligibility check failure so the PMR will use a dummy CHI number in the PFS Standard claim and your claim will still be submitted.

2. For MCR Registrations, the PMR will return a ‘pending registration’ status, if an attempt is made to register a new patient. The ‘pending registration’ status will still allow a serial script to be dispensed. Any registration submitted during the downtime will be passed to PRS the night the service is resumed, and the registration status response returned the next day via the daily registration update process, so you do not need to do anything different from your normal registration processes.

For clarity, this will not affect the scanning in of prescriptions or sending of prescription claim messages.

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