NHS National Record Locator (NRL) API Integration

Whether you’re building a clinical portal, ambulance service tool, or population health platform, 6B guides you through the entire NRL integration journey—from assessing technical feasibility and scoping requirements to navigating NHS assurance procedures, delivering deployment, and providing post-launch support.

Understanding the NHS NRL

The National Record Locator (NRL) is a central NHS index—built on Spine infrastructure—that does not store patient records itself, but maintains pointers to where records are held by provider systems. These pointers include details like where to retrieve a record, what type of data it is, and how to authenticate for access.

As a provider, your system can securely create, update, supersede, or delete pointers via the NRL FHIR API. As a consumer, your system can conduct searches using parameters such as patient, information type, provider, or information ID, then retrieve the relevant pointer and use it to access that record.

The NRL FHIR API v2.8.0 is currently in production, with v3 (Producer and Consumer) available in beta. Migration to v3 is underway and onboarding to v2.8.0 is closing unless already in process. Authentication and access must follow legal basis and use-case validation, and consumers require HSCN network access for operations like ASID lookup via the Spine Directory Service.

Our NHS NRL Integration Process

Our approach begins by working closely with your team to define your clinical use cases—covering both pointer creation (provider role) and pointer retrieval (consumer role)—and to select the correct API version and alignment with your product’s workflows.

We then design and implement the integration using the appropriate FHIR operations for your scenario: creating or updating pointers when your service holds information, or searching and retrieving pointers when your service consumes data. This development takes into account network requirements—ensuring provider systems can connect via HSCN or internet, and consumer systems are correctly configured to use HSCN for ASID lookup and access to Spine Directory Service.

Once development is underway, we manage the assurance phase. This includes authoring Supplier Conformance Assessment List (SCAL) documentation, addressing clinical safety requirements, ensuring alignment with NHS governance standards, and preparing your integration for testing in sandbox environments. We support you through witness testing and onboarding with NHS Digital, especially as you transition to NRL API v3 where applicable.

Finally, as your integration moves to production, we help validate that your system handles pointer lifecycle events (create, supersede, update, delete) properly and can reliably search and retrieve pointers. Once live, we offer ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and iterative enhancements, ensuring your integration remains conformant, resilient, and ready to evolve with NHS interoperability standards.

Benefits of NHS NRL Integration

Integrating with the NHS National Record Locator offers significant benefits to healthcare organisations and digital health innovators. By enabling clinicians to identify where patient records are stored, it improves patient safety and care continuity, ensuring that critical information is not overlooked or duplicated. The service also strengthens interoperability by linking systems across different care settings through nationally standardised FHIR APIs.

Beyond technical integration, NRL adoption reduces administrative burden by removing the need for manual record discovery processes such as phone calls or paper-based requests. For urgent and unscheduled care, it provides clinicians with rapid, real-time visibility of a patient’s records, allowing them to make faster and more informed decisions. Aligning with NRL standards also enhances the deployability of digital solutions across the NHS, offering assurance to stakeholders that your product meets national interoperability requirements and is future-proofed for continued use.