In this key public sector publication, Head of the Healthcare Practice at SynApps Gary Britnell discusses the interoperability challenge the NHS faces as it tries to become fully digital.

According to US digital health guru Robert Wachter, brought in by the Department of Health to advise the government on how to transition to a digital health service, “If I had any one piece of advice for the NHS around going digital, it’s to get interoperability right from the start. We have hospitals in the US that have great computers, but where 95% of the systems can’t talk to each other.”

He’s right: hospitals want to share patient data internally, as the paper chase chokes productivity, as our everyday experience with our NHS Trust customers shows. They also know that they’ll want to share that data with other providers as we move to break down the barriers between health and social care.

Many practitioners believe the best way of doing that is the Integrated Digital Care Record, the IDCR. The challenge: there’s no central, top-down route to get an IDCR; Trusts are going to have to build their own.

Getting to the digital NHS we need is not going to be easy. The good news is that once we have this in place, we will be able to do great things in the NHS, such as route information without any need for re-keying or asking the patient the same questions, allow collation of data for better analysis of the bigger trends, programmatic search, and so on. SynApps is actively engaged on building just such a practical way of doing so.

Read the article for yourself here