Interoperability important for tech fund

NHS England’s head of enterprise architecture has underlined the importance of interoperability to trusts putting together ‘tech fund 2’ bids.

In an interview with EHI, Inderjit Singh said he wanted to draw attention to the ‘interoperability jigsaw’ that the commissioning board has put together to lay the foundations for interoperability in the NHS.

The jigsaw is made up of three key pieces – the NHS Number as the primary patient identifier, interoperability standards, and open interfaces – which lock into a fourth piece, open systems.

Although this fourth piece has received more attention, with a lively debate on the role of open source in the NHS, Singh told EHI that the others are just as important; and that there is a particularly strong contractual push to start using the NHS Number.

In line with the ‘strategic and operational planning guidance’ that NHS England issued to trusts in December, the NHS standard contract for 2014-15 now includes a requirement to use the NHS Number in all clinical correspondence.

“We have been talking about the NHS number and how using it has been good practice, and now we want to move on so that it becomes core practice,” Singh said. “We want organisations to use the NHS Number as their primary identifier, and we want them to use it as early as possible.”

On interoperability standards, Singh said that trusts making tech fund 2 bids would be expected to use published standards, including those developed by the interoperability toolkit, where these existed.

“We know there is a cost around integration, so it does not make sense to use one to one interfaces where there are published integration standards,” he said. “We expect organisations to use ITK, and where it does not exist we expect organisations to work together to develop standards.”

He added that this would work feed into the further development of the ITK, which was set up around five years ago to support the ‘connect all’ shift away from the ‘rip and replace’ model of the National Programme for IT in the NHS.

The ITK focused initially on discharge summaries, but has since expanded to take in other NHS business requirements.

NHS England has indicated that it wants to fund further expansion, with the ITK additionally supporting other work, such as the work of the new Professional Records Standards Body set up to develop agreed headings for clinical records.

Finally, Singh said that he wanted to see trusts making tech fund bids working with suppliers to encourage them to open up their application programming interfaces “and to publish them as well.”

NHS England argues that, in addition to promoting interoperability, open APIs will make it easier to trusts to choose from a wider range of systems and for new entrants to innovate in the healthcare IT space.

However, Singh acknowledged that this would be a longer term project. “It won’t happen immediately, but it is important for organisations and their suppliers to start to move in this direction,” he said.

Overall, he argued that while NHS England was not in a position to ‘mandate’ any of the interoperability foundations, it was in a position to put down contractual drivers, and to lay down the expectation of progress in the adoption of ITK and open APIs. “We want to see progress as soon as possible.”

The deadline for trusts to submit their bids for the second round of the tech fund closes on 14 July.