As the cold, dark nights draw in there is nothing I like more than settling onto the sofa on a Tuesday night and getting my weekly fix of the Great British Bake Off. The technical challenge is always an amusing section, watching the bakers try to interpret the minimum instructions and create a super-sized baklava that will meet Paul and Prue’s professional eye. How many different interpretations of Baklava can there be?
Interoperability without standards is a bit like baking a cake without a recipe or ingredients, it’s complex, if nigh on impossible. For systems to communicate with each other, we need to know what resources should be included, what transportation method should be used, how we should transform it etc. This is where standards come in. They give us the full recipe and ingredients to enable us to make the right information available at the right time to the right person and remove that need for interpretation…we can all produce an identical show stopping cake that Paul and Prue would be proud of.
Healthcare Gateway have been providing interoperability for over 10 years and our product strategy is to enable our customers to conform to nationally mandated standards, where applicable.
With regards to standards, we were delighted this year to be provided with the opportunity to become a PRSB (Professional Records Standard Body) partner. This partnership has enabled us to attend events to hear about the standards that are in development and the impact that these standards have had on users and other system suppliers, and we hope to build some of these into our roadmap for next year.
FAST Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is essentially a standard for exchanging healthcare information – a specification on how one system asks another system for data and what it gets back in return. It covers both the technology and an agreement on what the data means. We are currently working with NHS Digital to gain accreditation for their Personal Demographic Search (PDS) FHIR API and have recently gone through conformance testing for this development. Gaining this accreditation will enable us to proceed further and become accredited to use GP Connect as a middleware supplier, allowing us to provide our customers with the ability to conform to national standards. PDS accreditation also enables us to integrate with a wider range of products produced by other providers, as well as to conform to best case information transfer schemas.
SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) CT is a clinical coding language used in electronic record systems in health and care. It is an international standard language that is being adopted by the NHS in England for the use in all systems used for the direct management of care. It is seen as the most comprehensive and precise clinical health terminology product in the world. SNOMED covers a wide range of clinical specialities, disciplines and requirements. It is used in more than fifty countries and is mapped to other international standards. Applying SNOMED CT as a standard means clinical information is recorded in a consistent, common way through all clinical records and supports the sharing of information with all individuals involved in the care of a patient. Our content model and some of our specialist datasets are going through a transformation to conform to SNOMED CT. We are re-specifying our content model into SNOMED CT and working with PRIMIS to enhance our content model to include additional items such as, Accessible Information Standards, radiotherapy and chemotherapy procedures, cervical cytology, Rockwood scores, height, weight, BMI and many more. We are also going to apply the national exclusion list to the content model to ensure sharing exclusions conform to national standards. Whilst this transition is in flight, we are working with our GP system suppliers to ensure that any new SNOMED CT that do not have a backwards map are incorporated into our existing content model, such as COVID-19 codes and you will be notified of any updates through our newsletter.
REST (Representational State Transfer) is the communication service used to allow services to connect to other servers/API and it uses a standard list of commands. REST is lighter weight and more efficient as it can use smaller message formats, and it also has the ability to handle multiple types of call and return different data formats. As part of their annual objective, our Development team have been working on creating a “RESTful MIG”. They are in the process of creating Extended Patient Trace, Patient Search and Detailed Care Record version 2 as a customer facing RESTful service. Creating these services in REST means we are future-proofing our services and provides us with more flexibility to enhance our services. It will also make it easier for new consumer systems to accredit to consume MIG data.
As 2022 approaches, we are excited to continue on our standards journey and receive that Star Baker apron. However, we’re always looking for ways to improve and innovate our services and help you conform to standards and would love to hear your views and ideas. If you would like to discuss your vision, ideas, gaps that need filling or hear more about what we have planned in the future, please contact the Product Management team.
By Sarah Dunwell, Head of Projects and Product at Healthcare Gateway
Sarah began her journey with Healthcare Gateway four years ago in the role of Product Manager, and since has built a wealth of expertise in product management. Sarah has recently been promoted to Head of Projects and Product where she will be bringing together different teams to efficiently manage and deliver the whole product life cycle.
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