CfH lead says standards important but not enough

10 Apr 2008

Defining standards is important but it is not sufficient, a leading Connecting for Health officer told delegates at a conference on sharing clinical documents and integrating workflow.

Jeremy Thorp, Connecting for Health’s director of information systems and business architecture, was speaking at a meeting organised by the IHE-UK Organisation and the British Computer Society, running alongside the first UK Connectathon in Oxford this week.

Thorp praised IHE-UK’s initiative. “IHE says let’s take the standards, let’s take some real life scenarios and see how they might work in practice and see how they actually work. It’s something which increasingly we see as being particularly important.”

He also spoke about the current NHS review of information and its close relationship to the wider review of NHS services, being conducted by health minister and leading surgeon, Lord Darzi.

Information and supporting information systems will be crucial, said Thorp. Without having a mechanism for sharing information it will be very difficult to change healthcare systems.

The review found that information needs are not always complex – timely delivery of simple pieces of information, for example when a patient arrives in the community or presents to primary care services, could make life a lot easier.

Thorp said that representatives from CfH would be visiting the Connectathon.

Delegates to the meeting had an opportunity to look inside the The Connectathon – a ‘big tent’ in a number of ways. Not only was it literally housed in a big tent – a large marquee in the grounds of St Catherine’s College – but it also provided a virtual big tent for dozens of European suppliers and around 300 of their representatives who spent the week testing and refining their systems’ ability to share clinical information with others.

“We are looking for bugs,” said monitor, Eric Poiseau, explaining that the Connectathon was about reducing the risk of bugs in a delivered system.

Customers who want to know whether the systems they are buying have undergone Connectathon testing should ask for an IHE integration statement, he said.

Reader's Comments

Standards must be enough

andy.hadley@ferndown.nhs.uk

14 Apr 08 12:11

The Connectathon was interesting and very practical - technical leads from many organisations doing real message exchange in a collaborative way.

But it did not appear to go beyond 'can we get a message through ?' to measuring the efficiency or scalability of exchanges (a problem that CfH messaging appears to suffer from hugely).

It is a shame that the CfH leaders were just visiting, and not perhaps mandating that their contractors were able to meet the challenges, to enable the NHS to work better in the Open Standards space. Current CfH contracts and architecture appear designed to frustrate rather than enable meaningful data interchange and integration. Especially when their chosen suppliers appear to be delivering so little and so late.