Interoperability: benefits and challenges

Healthcare interoperability matters because information cannot follow individuals around increasingly complex health and social care systems unless IT systems can communicate with each other.

John Campbell, programme manager at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, says interoperability delivers immediate results for staff and patients. "There is a reduction in multiple data inputs, saving users and patients time in re-providing their basic demographic data," he says.

"There is an improvement in data completeness, availability and quality because full data sets are provided to all subscribed systems when the master data is updated and transcription errors are removed."

Great Ormond Street improved interoperability between its patient administration systems and a number of departmental systems with ClearSpan, a forerunner of the Viaduct integration engine developed by BridgeForward, which was recently acquired by iSOFT.

But Campbell says that in future he wants to see systems "being developed using service orientated architectures and standards."

Developing such systems - and other practical barriers to creating a truly integrated healthcare system - will be discussed at an E-Health Insider round-table on the challenges of interoperability that iSOFT is sponsoring in October. Readers are invited to comment on the briefing paper for the event.

For further information on this feature, please contact the iSOFT marketing department on 01295 274 446 or Tamzin.rickett@isofthealth.com.