UK's Code4Health Interoperability Site Launched at EHILive 2015

A Code4Health community focusing on interoperability has been launched today at the EHI Live 2015 conference in Birmingham. NHS England has unveiled a new web tool to encourage people to discuss and define a list of key application programming interfaces needed to enable new models of working across health and social care. Inderjit Singh, head of enterprise architecture at NHS England, told Digital Health News the Code4Health community “is about bringing together localities, suppliers and national organisations as a group of peers.”

Also, that it was about “being clear about clinical priorities and needs for clinical interoperability and getting suppliers to deliver against that.” Singh added that a starter set of APIs already exists for primary care and the aim is to extend this to the integrated care space. New models of care to deliver greater efficiency are one of the key planks of NHS England’s ‘Five Year Forward View’ plans to close a projected £30 billion gap between funding and demand by 2020-21.

Many projects – from integrated care pioneers to Prime Minister’s Challenge Fund sites and vanguards – are now underway; and finding they need systems to share information between health and care teams. This is proving to be difficult, because of issues with interoperability and concerns about security and information governance. A recent evaluation of the Prime Minister’s Challenge Fund sites set out some of the interoperability issues and attempts to overcome them in some detail; saying more work needed to be done...