Two new surveys have been launched by NHS Transformation Directorate examining the current state of interoperability, integration, data accessibility and standards, and how they can be improved in future.
Recent feedback from the Digital Working Party suggests that these are pressing issues for member companies. There appears to be significant frustration regarding interoperability in the NHS, particularly the different systems and requirements across trusts, which greatly impact workflow. Removing these ‘blockers’ will eliminate unnecessary inefficiency.
As also reflected in the Digital Working Party survey, improved data architecture and data-sharing across organisations would undoubtedly benefit patient care by allowing member companies’ products to work more effectively and thus improve clinical decision-making.
Members may wish to push for a more streamlined, defined approach to data issues too, which may remove some of the familiar headaches associated with the topic which have been identified previously through feedback.
The first survey concerns “Crowdsourcing Existing Use Cases” – and calls for the submission of member companies’ existing use cases regarding interoperability, integration, data architecture issues and blockers in patient pathways that involve several care settings.
NHS Transformation Directorate (NHS/TD) aim to develop an Open Health and Care Data Architecture (OHCDA) to achieve a comprehensive ‘birth-to-death’ patient care record for everyone in the country across all care settings.
This is centred on the agreed principal that patient data should be made more accessible from and to all IT systems and builds on the mission goals established by NHS/TD for OHCDA: reducing the burden on staff, improved information accessibility for patients, safe data access, improved patient safety, and improving NHS productivity with digital technology.
Through reviewing your use cases, a judgment can be made on all steps from start to finish and a stronger impact assessment of where improvements can be made can be developed.
Please send your use cases to frontline.digitisation@nhs.net and ben@bivda.org.uk – the latter to ensure we can produce an industry-wide response. For full details of the survey and its requirements, please click here.
The “Blockers to adoption survey”, the second survey released by NHS/TD, aims to identify practical blockers and challenges to implementing standards and interoperability products/features in systems.
The survey will help validate and assess the prevalence of prior consultation and discovery work relating to incentives, financial, commercial issues, and technical challenges. A report will then be produced in July, following the survey’s closure on 17 June.
The survey should only take 15-25 minutes and should be done at an individual level, with as many individuals per organisation as possible. The survey can be accessed here.
For any further information, please contact interop.standards@nhsx.nhs.uk with “Blockers Survey” in the subject line.
