Enable seamless digital referrals and booking workflows across NHS services with 6B’s NHS Booking and Referral Standard (BaRS) integration services. We design and deliver secure, standards-based BaRS FHIR API integrations to improve patient care coordination and operational efficiency.
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6B partners with NHS Trusts, ICBs, and digital health innovators to integrate with the NHS BaRS standard. Our integrations ensure compliant, real-time data exchange between systems for referrals, bookings, and service availability. Whether you’re supporting urgent care, outpatient scheduling, or primary–secondary care transitions, we help you deliver an interoperable, future-ready solution.
The NHS Booking and Referral Standard (BaRS) is a national interoperability standard developed by NHS England. It provides a consistent, FHIR-based mechanism for exchanging referral and booking information between healthcare organisations.
BaRS was created to solve long-standing challenges around fragmented referral workflows and booking processes across NHS systems. Historically, data was passed between providers using paper forms, emails, or manual input into multiple systems. This introduced delays, risk of error, and operational inefficiencies.
With BaRS, booking and referral data is exchanged using secure FHIR APIs. These APIs route messages via unique service identifiers to the correct system, enabling providers to send and receive structured data directly within their clinical applications. The result is faster, more reliable communication that supports real-time decision-making and improves continuity of care.
BaRS currently supports use cases such as urgent care referrals, outpatient bookings, and information sharing between 111, primary care, and secondary care services.
At 6B, we guide our partners through a robust and collaborative BaRS integration journey, tailored to meet both clinical and technical needs.
We begin with a discovery phase to understand your system architecture, referral and booking workflows, and intended use cases. This helps us map your requirements to BaRS FHIR APIs and ensure alignment with NHS standards and governance expectations.
Once requirements are defined, we design an integration architecture that supports secure message routing, service lookup, and transactional updates. This includes service directory integration, patient context handling, FHIR resource mapping, and OAuth 2.0 authentication.
Our team then builds the integration using modular components and NHS-approved frameworks. We support setup and configuration of your environment, including access to NHS test environments and data sandboxes where applicable.
Testing is carried out to validate conformance to FHIR specifications, BaRS message structures, and endpoint security protocols. We also run workflow simulations to ensure the integration functions reliably across booking, referral, and response cycles.
Once validated, we assist with assurance submissions and go-live preparations. Post-deployment, we offer monitoring, optimisation, and ongoing support to ensure your BaRS integration remains secure, performant, and aligned with NHS changes.
Integrating with the NHS BaRS standard unlocks a number of operational and clinical benefits. It enables faster and more reliable exchange of referral and booking information, removing the need for paper processes, manual data re-entry, or fragmented communications.
For healthcare providers, BaRS integration supports better service coordination, reduces administrative burden, and helps clinicians access the right information at the right time. This leads to safer, more joined-up patient care.
Patients benefit from smoother journeys across NHS services – from faster bookings and referrals to improved communication between care teams. With reduced delays and clearer service pathways, overall care experience and outcomes improve.
For digital health suppliers, BaRS offers a scalable, standards-based way to connect into NHS workflows, supporting long-term interoperability goals and easing integration across multiple care settings.
We have real-world experience delivering BaRS and other HL7 FHIR-based integrations across NHS systems, with a strong understanding of clinical and technical use cases.
Our team supports you through discovery, assurance, development, and deployment, ensuring your integration is compliant, efficient, and future-proof.
6B builds modular, reusable integration components that allow your solution to scale across Trusts, ICBs, or national services without redevelopment.
We ensure every BaRS integration aligns with NHS security, clinical safety, and information governance standards from day one.
Our work bridges the gap between health tech innovators and NHS infrastructure, enabling seamless and secure interoperability that supports meaningful digital transformation.
