Enthusiastic response to ITK fund

More than 150 people have attended webinars on the new £2.2m Information Sharing Challenge Fund since it was announced on 31 August.

The Department of Health launched the fund last month to support information sharing projects that can be replicated across the NHS through the interoperability toolkit.

The total fund is worth £2.2m with individual awards of up to £99,000.

A spokesperson for the DH Informatics Directorate said that a series of webinars have been run since the fund’s announcement for anyone to attend; including NHS staff, suppliers, clinical professional bodies and the media.

There have been more than 150 attendees so far.

Applications to the fund must be received by 5 October and those projects awarded funding must deliver their agreed deliverables by 31 March 2013.

EHI understands there is a hope that this fund will not be a ‘one-off’ and there will be more financing to follow. However, the spokesperson said that at the moment: “There is no fund beyond this.”

“The Information Sharing Challenge Fund has been established to make funds available to NHS organisations who wish to introduce information sharing projects, based on the interoperability toolkit,” she said.

Decisions will be made by the Interoperability Investment Programme Board, which is looking for development, adoption and deployment ideas in the clinical correspondence, maternity forms, telehealth and personal health monitoring spaces.

The board is also looking for adoption and deployment ideas for dashboards and admission, transfer and discharge information, which are already covered by ITK.

Information on how to apply can be found on the NHS Connecting for Health website.