This story in Digital Health earlier this year got me thinking about the word ‘common’ in a bit more detail and its relevance and importance to the UK healthcare market, especially regarding the use and adoption of data standards to facilitate interoperability. The article looks at The Health and Social Care (Safety and Quality) Bill that proposes to mandate a common patient identifier across the health and social care system. The premise: being able to better track a patient across all health and social care services.
Privacy issues aside – which the Digital Health article does address – I am a major supporter of ‘common’ across the UK healthcare space. By definition, ‘common’ suggests a standard way of doing something and here, at BridgeHead Software, we are keen advocates of a standards-based approach.
Interoperability at the heart of BridgeHead’s solutions
Take our own HealthStore® Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), which we often describe as a next generation vendor neutral archive (VNA). HealthStore embraces ‘common’ healthcare data standards and practices – XDS, HL7, DICOM, to name but a few. By adhering to these common standards, we have created a truly technology agnostic and standards-based patient information repository for all healthcare data that promotes interoperability. You can read more about the benefits of a strategic data management approach in our recent customer story on our successful deployment of HealthStore at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
Commonality and standards are good for the NHS. Why? If technology vendors adhere to and embrace a common approach to technology adoption and healthcare data standards it should – in theory at least – help in developing a truly integrated health and social care landscape whereby the interoperability of clinical systems enable care providers to get a full picture of a patient and collaborate with one another on more complex cases.
Common formats and schemas for capturing information about patients makes it easier to store, share and analyse data. It prevents vendor lock in – again more detail on that in the Bradford story mentioned above – and that, in itself, reduces risk and possible costs of future IT projects.
On the whole, commonality is a good thing. The common patient identifier, common systems, common approaches, common standards all should help to improve hospital efficiency, reduce risk and costs and, ultimately, provide better standards of care to patients. Clinicians need access to data, when they need it and where they need it – common data standards go a long way in facilitating this.
By John McCann, Director of Marketing – EMEA
Twitter: @johnlmccann
