Vendor-Driven Standards for Interoperability

INTEROPen is a collaborative that was set up over three years ago to promote the development and adoption of open standards for interoperability in health and social care. There were seven founder members, of which InterSystems was one, but there are 350 organisations involved today.

I think INTEROPen has grown so quickly for two reasons. The first because the focus of NHS policy has been to create integrated health and care organisations to shift care closer to the patient. The second is because it has long been recognised that the highest risks of poor quality care and gaps in care occurring is when care is handed over from one provider to another, or where patient care has to be delivered by a multi-disciplinary team made up of workers from different organisations, who use different systems.

Both of these drivers require IT systems that organisations use to ‘talk to each other’ as health and social care secretary Matt Hancock puts it.

And the way to get systems talking to each other is to make sure they use standards to code and structure and exchange data in the same way.