Provenance Data Standard

Provenance Data Standard

The Provenance Data Standard has been updated to take account of feedback that we have received from our partners, members, and stakeholders. Please now use this new version in your systems. A list of updates to this standard can be found in the V1.2 release notes.

Looking forward, we will be reviewing all existing PRSB standards and updating them to take account of the Provenance Data Standard. We will keep you informed of new versions to standards as soon as they are released.

On this page

Current release

Version: v1.2
Release date
February 2023
Release notes
V1.2 Release notes
Next release date
February 2026
Next release type
Scheduled release
The standard
PRSB viewer
Open the online viewer
Full standard – Excel
Excel file
Full standard – Json
Json file
Supporting documentation
Description/purpose
Implementation guidance
This document includes general implementation guidance for all PRSB standards.
Male And Female Nurse Working At Nurses Station

Need implementation support?

We provide a support and maintenance service for organisations who are using and implementing PRSB standards. Contact us by phone, email or complete our online form. You will get an automated ID number, and a response within 5 working days. All enquiries are used to improve our products and services.

About this standard

Implementing standards is PRSB’s key purpose, and to help health and care professionals and suppliers adopt them, we are making changes to our published standards to make them easy to use.  PRSB has produced an information model that describes who made the record entry or carried out the activity, where and when. This is known as provenance data. This information model simplifies how we include this data in our standards, which is essential but repetitive.

The data includes:

  • Performing professional
  • Date
  • Location
  • Person completing record
  • Date recorded

 

We are carrying out an exercise to change how these data items appear in PRSB standards. Provenance data will now be referenced as ‘Information type’ within each standard. This will not change how professionals record this information in care records but removes repetition in the standards, making the standards much shorter and easier to read and use.

For suppliers using PRSB standards for the first time, you will need to implement the provenance data standard as part of implementing any other PRSB standards. Implementing the provenance data standard in your system will save time and effort and eliminate duplication as you will only need to implement it once to use it throughout our standards.

For suppliers already using PRSB standards you will not have to do anything.  The data items in the provenance data standard were previously repeated explicitly wherever they are used in each of our existing standards. 

Implementing new standards should be easy as the data items in the provenance data standard should already be in your systems and can be applied to new standards.

No your Quality Mark remains valid. The provenance data standard simply changes the way PRSB presents its standards so that they are easy to implement.

Your system should already be capable of recording the data items in the standard as you have implemented at least one PRSB standard already, and most of standards contain the data items listed in the provenance data standard.

Nothing different. As a health or social care professional you will still record details about who performed or recorded professional activities, where and when.

The aim is to simplify the way in which we define the data in our standards, making it easier for you to read and use, and for suppliers to implement our standards in your IT systems.

 

How it works

PRSB has expanded the range of formats in which our standards can be viewed and used by clinicians, care professionals and data architects for different purposes. The PRSB viewer is intended for quick review, while the excel view or machine readable JSON format can be used for detailed mapping, testing and building applications and specifications for software and datasets, etc.

Our standards will now be available in the following formats:

  • PRSB viewer (online)
  • JSON file (download)
  • EXCEL file (download)


We have also created a new  Explainer to help you understand standards and how to use them.

Further resources

Further improvements in how PRSB manages its standards portfolio will be announced in due course. Contact us if you have further suggestions on how standards can be improved to make them more useful and usable.

  • Standards explained
    PRSB’s guide to standards which sets out the purpose and benefits of using standards and how to support frontline professionals to adopt them.
  • IHRIM record correction guidance
    Despite vigilance when filing information in records, mistakes can occur. The Institute of Health Records and Information Management has guidance to support professionals in making corrections following errors.

CHAT theory also explicitly addresses five areas which if addressed systematically will help overcome stakeholder differences in pursuit of the common goal:

1. Understanding the artefacts that characterise the group and its activity.
• The artefacts might be clinical settings or the forms and templates used to capture and share information. During the pilot we heard about hard copy Dialog response forms; locally generated templates for collating information from different systems; letters and emails to GPs; images, poems or other non-text artefacts that service users might want to include in their ‘about me’ or care plan.

2. Understanding the multi-views of the group. Such groups are always a community of multiple points of view, traditions and interests. 
• Different participants in the group will have different roles and will bring to the group and their roles their own histories, language, and ‘rules’. During our Stocktake preparations and workshops we worked with psychiatrists, mental health nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, transformation leads and voluntary sector representatives, all professions and interests with their own language, approaches professional ‘rules’ but united in their interest in care plans, care planning.

3. Activity systems (like the ICSs) take shape and get transformed over periods of time. ‘Historicity’ is a term coined to express how the group’s problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history. 

 

• ‘We’ve always done it this way’, ‘that didn’t work before’, ‘it’s always like this’, ‘it wasn’t always like this’, ‘they are changing things again’, are all typical statements that often frustrate those charged with overseeing change initiatives. Without addressing the experiences that lie behind such comments you risk repeating mistakes of the past, alienating your stakeholders or just not understanding the real starting point for your transformation project. This is particularly the case for the implementation of the PCSP standard, the success of which will be largely reliant on point-of-care practices and information protocols as well as having systems which are user friendly and appropriately configured.

4. The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development. Contradictions are not the same as problems or conflicts. Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems. Collectively addressing contradictions in how policy, practice, culture and technology interact will empower teams to find genuinely novel solutions for apparently intractable challenges, like interoperability and shared care plan/planning. 

This links to the fifth principle that:

5. the possibility of expansive transformations in activity systems. As the contradictions of an activity system are aggravated, some individual participants begin to question and deviate from its established norms. In some cases, this escalates into collaborative envisioning and a deliberate collective change effort. “An expansive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are re-conceptualised to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity.”