NHS Digital
NHS England Digital is the national provider of digital health technology for the NHS in England. It delivers a comprehensive suite of REST and FHIR APIs covering patient demographic services, personal demographics, electronic prescriptions, summary care records, referrals and bookings, GP Connect, vaccination records, and national clinical data services. APIs are hosted on the NHS API platform at api.service.nhs.uk with sandbox and production environments, supporting OAuth 2.0 / private-key JWT, NHS CIS2 Care Identity, NHS login, and API-key authentication patterns.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles NHS Digital the way a machine reads it — 31 machine-readable artifacts across 23 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — NHS Digital scores 44.7/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile NHS Digital
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for NHS Digital. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 23
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
Personal Demographics Service - FHIR API
Access the national NHS patient demographic database. Supports search, retrieval, and update of patient records including names, addresses, dates of birth, registered GPs, nomin...
Electronic Prescription Service - FHIR API
Transmit electronic prescriptions between prescribers and community dispensers. Prescribers can create, encode, and cancel prescriptions; dispensers can download prescriptions, ...
Summary Care Record - FHIR API
Access a patient's Summary Care Record (SCR), a national electronic record of key clinical information derived from GP records. Also provides access to the Access Control Servic...
National Record Locator - FHIR API
Locate and access patient information shared by other NHS healthcare organisations to support direct patient care. Supports both producer and consumer roles, enabling providers ...
Booking and Referral - FHIR API
Send booking and referral information between NHS service providers following the NHS Booking and Referral Standard (BaRS). Enables interoperable bookings and referrals across u...
GP Connect Appointment Management - FHIR API
Manage appointments across GP practices. Enables third-party systems to search for available slots, book appointments, amend or cancel bookings, and retrieve appointment details...
e-Referral Service - FHIR API
Interact with the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS), the national paperless referral system for primary and secondary care. Supports creating and managing referrals, retrieving avai...
Immunisation History - FHIR API
Retrieve a patient's immunisation history recorded in NHS national systems. Supports clinical decision-making, care continuity, and patient-facing applications by providing stru...
NHS App API
Engage with users of the NHS App, enabling healthcare organisations and suppliers to send in-app messages, manage notifications, and trigger communications to patients who have ...
Directory of Healthcare Services (Service Search) API
Search for NHS healthcare services across England including GPs, dentists, opticians, hospitals, pharmacies, and other care settings. Returns structured service information, loc...
NHS Login API
Authenticate patients and members of the public using NHS login, the national identity service for patient-facing digital health services in England. Implements OpenID Connect a...
Spine Directory Service - FHIR API
Query the Spine Directory Service (SDS) to look up endpoint information, organisation codes, and service metadata for NHS organisations and systems registered on the NHS Spine. ...
Health Research Data Catalogue API
Retrieve metadata about NHS health datasets suitable for publication in health research catalogues. Enables researchers and data controllers to discover available NHS datasets, ...
NHS Website Content API
Pull content from the NHS.UK website about health conditions, medications, live well guidance, mental health, care and support, and the NHS system. Returns structured JSON conte...
Message Exchange for Social Care and Health (MESH) API
Exchange messages and data files between NHS organisations using MESH, the national messaging infrastructure. Supports sending and receiving structured clinical messages, bulk d...
NHS Digital Booking API
The Booking API from NHS Digital — 2 operation(s) for booking.
NHS Digital communication API
The communication API from NHS Digital — 4 operation(s) for communication.
NHS Digital Message API
The Message API from NHS Digital — 1 operation(s) for message.
NHS Digital Metadata API
The Metadata API from NHS Digital — 2 operation(s) for metadata.
NHS Digital R4 API
The R4 API from NHS Digital — 6 operation(s) for r4.
NHS Digital Referral API
The Referral API from NHS Digital — 2 operation(s) for referral.
NHS Digital Slots API
The Slots API from NHS Digital — 1 operation(s) for slots.
NHS Digital STU3 API
The STU3 API from NHS Digital — 32 operation(s) for stu3.
Scroll within the panel for all 23 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Plans
PLANSRate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Apis Context
JSON-LDSecurity Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for NHS Digital — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 4
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 4
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 2
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Other 2
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/nhs-digital · machine-readable index on apis.io