Intellect supports new emphasis on vibrant healthcare market and announces recommendations to enable NHS information sharing
Intellect, the trade association for the ICT sector, has today welcomed the Dept of Health’s commitment to working with us to create a vibrant marketplace in health and social care which will deliver interoperable systems on a local level.
To coincide with the announcement Intellect has published a paper, ‘We should talk – Interoperability and the NHS’, which outlines recommendations that will enable the NHS to share clinical information better.
Intellect is asking DH to urgently focus on enabling and stimulating the market to deliver interoperable systems to maximize the return on existing and future investment in IT. This should be supported by a central focus on clinical information sharing in the NHS Information Strategy.
Jon Lindberg, Intellect’s healthcare programme manager said:
“Interoperability offers a golden opportunity for NHS information systems to deliver many of the benefits once promised by NPfIT but at a fraction of the cost. The NHS market is already moving beyond NPfIT, but to achieve a ‘Connect All’ strategy alongside local decision-making we need joined-up thinking.”
Intellect Healthcare Council members, and principal authors of this paper, Paul Cooper and Martin Whittaker said:
“To achieve interoperability in the NHS, suppliers, Connecting for Health and Trusts have to work on improving the Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) programme. The benefits of ITK will only be delivered if all parties invest in the most appropriate solutions, and suppliers and Trusts are convinced of its feasibility. But this will not happen unless as much attention is paid to the market as to the technology. If done properly, this should allow the NHS to progress quickly and ensure that interoperability becomes the norm over the next few years.”
Among its recommendations Intellect calls for:
•Productive and collaborative engagement with suppliers
•Evangelising the benefits of information sharing by educating the business and clinical leaders of the NHS, not just the IT specialists
•ITK to become a central plank of the NHS Information and Technology Strategies
•ITK to be based on the same principles as the most successful information sharing system in the world (the Internet) – open systems and open standards
•ITK compliance to be a positive process with an encouragement to succeed, not a barrier to entry
About Interoperability
One of the greatest assets of any system of healthcare is information: information about the patient, their clinical history and lifestyle, available treatments etc. Most of this information is held on IT systems, but that’s also the problem: the information is usually held on any number of IT systems that do not communicate with each other. Thus it is essential that we have interoperation between IT systems, coherent with where the patient receives their primary, secondary and tertiary care together with social care. Without interoperability no carer can know as much about the patient as they should. Tests are repeated, inappropriate care may be given and hospital stays extended which means healthcare processes are less effective and the NHS is less efficient.
To ensure the NHS could better share information and join up care, NHS Connecting for Health developed the Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) in 2009 to join up the plethora of legacy systems already in place. Intellect has welcomed this initiative as a good opportunity to achieve interoperability, but stress that some key changes have to be made for it to work properly and deliver the results we all want.
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