GP seeks greater urgency on interoperability

A GP who has pioneered record sharing between GP and community teams wants to see local service providers giving interoperability a higher priority.

Dr Kambiz Boomla’s practice was the first surgery in London to trial EMIS Web, the common clinical record system from GP IT supplier EMIS. But he says plans to interoperate with hospital systems have so far failed to happen.

He said: “We would like to be able to see information held on hospital systems, but Barts and The London NHS Trust, for example, which has installed [a version] of Cerner’s system, is just not capable of doing that.”

Dr Boomla said he did not believe interoperability with GP systems carried a high enough priority from LSPs and that this was a wider problem than just Barts or Cerner.

He told EHI Primary Care: “What I would like to see is NHS Connecting for Health putting pressure on LSPs to get interoperability with GP systems higher up the corporate agenda of hospital software suppliers.”

Dr Boomla said the importance of interoperability with GP systems should also increase with the shift away from the single system vision to one where a variety of different systems would need to be supported.

Last week’s EMIS National User Group conference heard that more than 1,000 practices have now had their data streamed from their existing EMIS systems to EMIS Web.

The company said that practices should be able to use the new appointments system in EMISWeb within the next two or three months, followed by use of EMISWeb as a clinical management system.