Leading industry organisations have come together to create INTEROPen, a supplier action group aimed at accelerating the development of open standards for interoperability in the health and social care sector.
It provides a forum for suppliers to collaborate on the design and application of technical interoperability standards. The areas covered by the group include Data exchange, Data validation, Defining APIs and Governance. It is an action group whereby members commit to design, validation and demonstration using real systems.
InterSystems shares the belief in openness, transparency, and in the context of INTEROPen’s activities, putting commercial interests aside to design interoperability standards to deliver the new models of care that our health and social care system needs.
The overall objective of the group is to actively demonstrate the flow of data between domains, and between separate supplier IT systems using the standards.
To achieve that the group’s activities will be focused on:
- Data exchanges between the different care domain systems e.g. GP, acute, community, mental health, child health, maternity, social care. This data exchange will favour structured data whenever possible, with development proposals where it is lacking.
- The establishment and validation, both clinical and technical, of FHIR based profiles for the exchange of granular transactional data between systems. These standards will operate alongside other standards such as CDA, which is targeted at document exchange. INTEROpen will work in partnership with the Professional Records Standards Body (PRSB) to establish FHIR profiles and CDA standards that are clinically fit for purpose.
- The definition of APIs with associated trigger events to carry the data, particularly real time requests and posts.
- Informing the requirements for the technical governance rules, security mechanisms, and regional architectures that will be necessary to safely exchange data in an acceptable manner.
All activities will be open and transparent and operate in collaboration and in coordination with other interoperability initiatives from the Code4health community, NHS England and NHS Digital where the transparency is reciprocated.
We are proud to be a member of this emerging working group of suppliers, dedicated to accelerating the formation and validation of standardised approaches to interoperability in the health and social care system.
INTEROPen can be contacted by emailing suppliergroup@interopen.org.