A poll has revealed that half of Digital Health News readers believe interoperability standards should be the top priority for the new national CCIO, Dr Simon Eccles.
On 16 February, Dr Eccles tweeted his five key priorities for IT in the NHS in 2018, which included promoting interoperability standards as well as giving patient access to records and delivering on what NHS England had already promised.
In response, Digital Health News launched a poll to find out which of Dr Eccles five priorities readers believed to be most important.
Of the 271 voters, 50% said interoperability standards should be top of the CCIO’s list, with ‘doing what we said we would do’ coming in second at 21%.
In third place was patient access to records, scoring 17% of the votes, while business and research intelligence came in fourth with 8%.
Digital Health also asked readers to submit their own suggestions, with one reader suggesting e-prescribing in hospitals should be a priority of Dr Eccles.
Dr Eccle’s tweet received a lot of feedback from social media users.
One addressed the so-called “elephant in the room” and said the national CCIO should look into how “most clinical systems in clinical settings are unusable by clinicians”.
Dr Eccles responded: “Yes yes yes! I’ve worked with some truly dreadful clinical software. Too few vendors, out of date interfaces and minimal interoperability.
“A vibrant software market, FHIR data standards, national strategic authentication, local single sign on all needed.”
16 March 2018 @ 22:16
Right to be #1 concern. The lack of interoperability of GP systems has been one of the main barriers to delivering shared care, despite being a requirement of GPSOC for the last 4 years. There is a greater chance of observing Hawking Radiation from a black hole than seeing an API!
17 March 2018 @ 00:25
About 20 years ago, when GP-lab interoperability was introduced, we all thought we had it pretty much cracked. Then IMC (previous incarnation of NHS Digital) declared victory, stopped funding work on interoperability standards and spread, and progress ground to a halt. A sad story of a wasted opportunity.
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10 March 2018 @ 17:09
Glad but not surprised that interoperability is #1 issue. We need to make sure that people know the basics.
I continue to be surprised how relatively few people (in UK compared with for example USA) have read our book (with Grahame Grieve) “Principles of health interoperability SNOMED CT HL7 and FHIR”. It was written for the NHS.
15 March 2018 @ 14:40
+1 for Tim’s book. A thoroughly informative and enlightening read. The foreward (of the book) is written by John Halamka, MD, MS who is a member of the National Advisory Group on Health IT in England. A report published by this group (the ‘Wachter Review’) found that interoperability should be built in from the start. So it seems that everyone knows, understands and appreciates that interoperability is essential for the future of health IT. However, realising the ROI of interoperability is nigh on impossible for IT vendors & this makes it difficult to get it onto product roadmaps. A legislative approach would help the interoperability agenda massively.
9 March 2018 @ 15:10
Interesting to see patient access to records coming in third. Getting patients to take greater ownership of their condition would be enhanced by online access to patient appointments linked with the patient’s own medical data, accessible on a secure but open, patient’s portal. Sounds like a good starting point while the challenges of full access to the historical patient charts is addressed.
9 March 2018 @ 14:14
What about patient centred care in the community for mental health joining up not only NHS parties but police and social services too?