The NHS Personal Demographics Service (PDS) is one of the most fundamental subsystems in the NHS Spine. It is the national electronic database of NHS patient demographic details such as name, address, date of birth and NHS Number.
Through SMH, CareMotive offer two ways of interacting with PDS; a functionally limited interface SMSP interface, and a fully-fledged mode using SMH’s native interface.
Use of the SMSP interface is permitted by HSCIC without the use of smartcards for authentication or a lengthy compliance process, but the only facilities available are a limited set of searches which return a subset of available demographics.
The fully-fledged mode permits many access to many additional PDS facilities including:
In addition to being a valuable service in its own right, the use of PDS is required as part of obtaining eReferrals and Electronic Prescription compliance.