As of Friday, BridgeHead Software has officially signed up to TechUK’s Health and Social Care Interoperability Charter – an initiative designed to realise a vision for ‘Making Integrated Care Happen’ across the UK healthcare system. As one of the first wave of vendors to support the Interoperability Charter, BridgeHead is delighted to be part of a community rallying to implement real change in relation to the way healthcare systems communicate and interact with one another.
Building on a paper published by TechUK in March entitled, ‘Our Vision for Interoperability’, the Charter outlines the requirements from suppliers to make their information systems more open and easier to integrate and to enable the free-flow of patient information between products. Ultimately, these requirements can be summarised under 5 key tenets.
The 5 Key Tenets of the Interoperability Charter
All signatories to the Interoperability Charter have to commit to the following tenets:
- We will make available to other suppliers and the NHS, the technical specifications of our interfaces without charge
- Where there is customer demand we agree to co-operate without charge with other suppliers in developing interfaces
- We will not reinvent the wheel and will use internationally recognised standards where relevant
- We will only charge reasonable and proportionate fees to the end user organisation for Licensing, Implementation and Support services required for the interfaces
- Where new interfaces or enhancements to existing interfaces are required, we will not charge the NHS twice for the same software development.
BridgeHead’s Commitment To Healthcare Data Standards
For some time now, BridgeHead has demonstrated its commitment to Healthcare Data Standards, through support for DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), HL7 (Health Level Seven International), CIFS (Common Internet File System) and the newer XDS (Cross-Enterprise Document Sharing) standards. And it’s refreshing to see our customers pushing to ensure these standards are followed when managing their patient information in our HealthStore® independent clinical archive (ICA), also referred to as a next generation vendor neutral archive (VNA).
It’s only when all healthcare organisations (IT vendors, the NHS and local government) support and adhere to these common standards that we are going to realise the full potential of the patient data that is being amassed in this new digital world (see my recent blog: Healthcare data standards – for the ‘common’ good).
By John McCann, Director of Marketing – EMEA
Twitter: @johnlmccann
