CfH technology boss says paper not fit for purpose

Connecting for Health’s chief technology officer, Paul Jones has stressed the importance of integrating standards to achieve interoperability in healthcare, saying paper is “no longer fit for purpose”.

Speaking at last week's Connecting for Health’s SNOMED CT and interoperable healthcare conference, Jones said health providers were under increased pressure to ensure the care they provide is “safe, effective, reproducible and state-of-the-art”.

“It should also be available wherever a patient is and able to deal with whatever is wrong with them, aiding prevention of any further illnesses or harm,” he added.

Jones said CfH aimed to achieve connected healthcare through the use of common standards allowing all healthcare systems to interoperate.

“Paper is no longer fit for purpose. It introduces multiple themes – safety and completeness, care plans and pathways, workload and availability and so on…Everyone has their own idea of good, but there is no need to worry because we have standards – and lots of them,” Jones said.

These include terminologies such as Read and SNOMED CT, classifications such as OPCS, the NHS data dictionary, messaging standards including HL7, and different content modelling standards.

“They all have a role to play in the context of electronic health records, including recording, decision making, searching, categorising data and being interoperable with other systems used across healthcare settings,” he said.

Jones quoted Sir John Harvey-Jones, former chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, saying: “Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. And the nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.”

Looking to the future, he spoke about CfH’s involvement in the Open Health Tools initiative - a collaborative effort between international health agencies, major healthcare providers and international standards organisations.

The collaboration are looking to create a new type of interoperable standard, which will be known as the Logical Record Architecture.

This will work closely with the OHT Platform, consisting of a Health Service Bus providing common services, such as reporting, analytics, data interchange, security, and medical device integration, and the Service Library providing terminology services, public health services such as outbreak management and extensibility technologies like web services.

The Health Service Bus will integrate with all point of service applications, as well as data access applications, enabling standardised interoperable service delivery.

The Logical Record Architecture will ensure that all healthcare systems meet clinical governance, information governance and regulatory requirements from conception to implementation.

Jones concluded: “Remember, it is all about sharing.”