Publish to the Multicast Notification Service

When onboarding to MNS as a publisher, there are two main objectives:

• onboard to our API to be able to publish your event
• design your event and filters based on your user's needs

If you have already onboarded to MNS and would like to publish a new event, you can skip Apply to integrate with MNS and go ahead and design your new event.

We follow the generic assurance process for APIs and services. This guide adds MNS specific context to the generic flow.

You can learn more about assurance by looking at digital onboarding guidance.
 

When you are ready to onboard to the /events API, register through the Digital Onboarding Service. As an event publisher, we will ask you for information we need to assess and approve your use of MNS.

If you have already registered for digital onboarding, we will let you know. We will also let you know if the product you are onboarding has already been registered.

This process can take up to three months, so we recommend starting it as early as possible. You don't have to do each step in order - you can do many of them in parallel.

Follow the instructions on the digital onboarding guidance page to:

• register your personal developer account
• set up your organisation and team
• add your product
• confirm your use case
• register your environment
• start the assurance process

When prompted to select the APIs or access modes you want to use, select Multicast Notification Service.

When completing your digital onboarding application you must confirm you have a valid use case. 

As a publisher, you will need to provide details of your product and what it does, and explain why the publish-subscribe model used by MNS is appropriate for your service.

Before you submit the use case section you should:

• read the guidance on designing your MNS event
• understand any key dependencies you have
• estimate the number of events you will have
• estimate the number of subscribers to the events you will have

We will review your answers and may contact you if we require any more information.

In this step you will:

• design your event and filters
• publish the event to our API
• test your software (we recommend you subscribe to Multicast Notification Service to do this)

For guidance on designing your event, refer to the Design your Multicast Notification event page and to contact us please use the Developer Community.

For general guidance on developing software for NHS systems, refer to the guidance on building healthcare software.

Before your software can go live, you must complete assurance.

During assurance you will demonstrate that your software meets the required technical and operational standards.

You will need to:

• demonstrate your integration in the MNS integration test environment 
• demonstrate that your event publishes successfully and can be received by a subscriber 
• confirm how you manage non-functional requirements such as security, clinical risk and service management

In this step you will:

• submit your configuration details for the production environment
• go live with your software
• handle any changes that may occur once you are live

It may take up to 2 weeks to get to the point of being ready to go live.

When publishing an event to MNS you need to have integrated with the MNS API. You can design your event and onboard to the API at the same time.

If you have already onboarded to the MNS API, you do not need to request to integrate to the API again.

If you require further information regarding your onboarding journey, contact us.