Version 1.9.3, built 2026-10-19, checked against NHA's NHCX package 1.0.0.

READ FIRST: CORE

Before anything else, read references/CORE.md and keep it in mind for the whole task. Its Instructions are binding: follow them strictly in every step and every file, and re-read them at the start of each step (L1 to L8). Its Confusions settle what easily mixed-up terms mean; when a word is ambiguous, CORE.md decides. It also holds the base URLs and, for every exchange, the route, bundle, workflow id and callback.

WHICH SIDE

This skill is the provider side: it builds NHCX into a hospital's HMIS, the participant that asks (eligibility, plan, pre-authorisation, claim) and is answered. The folder payer/ is the payer side of the same skill: an insurer, TPA or scheme system, the participant that answers, files cases and decides them. The two share nothing but the gateway design; their ids (S1, A1, C1) are numbered separately and never mix.

Decide the side at the start of L1 discovery, before any spec is matched, and record it as side in nhcx-plan/discovery.json and in the progress log:

• provider when the target admits patients, keeps practitioners and encounters, bills an insurer, or has a claims desk that submits: continue with this file and the specs, steps and references at this root, and ignore payer/ entirely.
• payer when the target keeps members or beneficiaries, products or policies and their enrolments, adjudicates claims on a desk, or disburses money: stop here, open payer/SKILL.md and follow it as the whole skill from its own L1, and ignore every spec, step and reference at this root. Everything it links to is inside payer/.
• both (a system that admits patients and also runs a scheme): two integrations, one per side, each planned and logged on its own; do the side the user asked for first, and never mix the two id sets in one plan file.

When in doubt, ask the user which side the target is before L1.1. A later prompt that finds the other side was meant logs a corrected entry and starts again from L1 on the right side.

UPDATE FIRST

At the start of every task, before the questions and L1, and at the start of every later prompt that continues the work, check whether the NHCX package carries a newer build of this skill, and if it does, install it and work from it.

Independent of the MCP and of the knowledge source. The check always reads the package on GitHub, whichever knowledge source L1.0 chose: a connected nhcx-docs MCP neither answers it nor skips it, and the MCP's catalogue_info version is never compared with the skill's. The skill's version is its own: it is not the package's release tag, nor the catalogue's version, nor 1.0.0; only the version in skills/manifest.json is compared with it.