No second round of ITK

There will not be a second round of interoperability tool kit projects run by the Department of Health. Instead, the DH’s Technology Office will work with trusts on interoperability on an ad hoc basis.

Almost 18-months since the ITK initiative began, Paul Jones, head of the technology office, told E-Health Insider that nearly all of the 20 projects had been completed. “We have 20 services at the moment and are working on others.”

Most projects were finished by April, but the prolonged civil service purdah caused by the general election has kept the wraps on much of the work.

Jones’ boss, NHS director general of informatics Christine Connelly, described the initiative as an Apple-style ‘app store’ when she launched it in April 2009.

However, Jones said that rather than being an app store, or a way of opening up local service provider systems, ITK had developed as a way of focusing on the interfaces needed to share data between systems to support specific common use cases.

Examples include text messaging, check-in kiosks and discharge summaries. “We don’t want to create another 20 to 40 as it becomes ineffective,” he added.

“But if you are doing an interoperability project work with my team then we will aim to publish that as the standard method.”

He said the aim is to ensure that if one trust develops an interface to a particular system, it then becomes the de facto standard used across the NHS.

The coalition government has made clear that it sees the future of the NHS and NHS technology lying in decisions that are made at a local level.

However, Jones said trusts can “see the benefits of central accreditation” done in “as non-onerous a way as possible”.

Read the full interview with Paul Jones in Opinion and Analysis