Today’s health and care is a team effort. Ensuring any member of a person’s care team can access the latest information about them is vital to providing joined-up care. PRSB’s Core Information Standard defines all the relevant information that should be shared for care in an integrated care system.   

Orion Health has achieved what no other supplier has yet accomplished; conformance with PRSB’s standard for shared care records. As a global provider of healthcare information technology, delivering over 55 shared care records in over 15 countries is an enviable accomplishment. But what are the benefits of sharing core information and how did Orion Health find the conformance assessment experience?  

When implemented in systems, the Core information Standard allows health and care professionals to view and share information such as a person’s demographics, allergies and medications, but also information that matters the most to them as individuals; for example, how to communicate with them.  

Orion Health has been delivering shared care records in the UK for 10 years, but finding the right expertise in the beginning proved challenging. Ben Wilson, Product Solution Director at Orion Health, says: “We would get into a room with clinicians or anyone we could find with some clinical input who would help define what needed to be included in shared care records – it wasn’t defined very well at that time.” 

Even now, not all systems share the same sets of information, and it’s also not collected in a coherent way. This lack of consistency makes it difficult to share information across the system for the benefit of patients. 

Ben highlights that one of the difficulties in building shared care records refers to communication, which can be improved by common information frameworks – standards. “We’re not always talking the same language with other suppliers. Standards help us achieve that common understanding on the exact information which needs to be part of shared care records.”   

To fully embrace the benefits of using standards, there needs to be a culture change – improving cross-organisational collaboration, attitudes and trust about information sharing. “It would be beneficial if we could shift attitudes among suppliers to get an appreciation of standards, and how we can share information in a more consistent way to support people as they move around the care system”, says Ben.  

Health and care leaders have an important role to play in facilitating the use of standards. This includes procuring systems that conform to them and supporting suppliers with their conformance journey. Ben explains: “These standards only become beneficial when there’s a critical majority of health and care systems conforming to them.” 

Orion Health has seen a lot of their customers implement the elements of the Core Information Standard, but not in a structured way. This was a motivating factor for Orion, and they decided that conformance assessment of their implementation of the standard would drastically help standardise clinical and non-clinical information within shared care records, making it available wherever and whenever needed across different health and care organisations. 

Speaking about the conformance process, Ben shares: “We worked with Annette and the PRSB team on a weekly basis, taking a strategic approach to the assessment process. Each week, we set an agenda to go through different sections of the standard. It was a delightful experience – we worked collaboratively and learnt a lot from Annette and the team around clinical practice, and I hope that they also learnt from us on how shared care records operate.”  

“It would be fantastic to see more suppliers follow our lead and become conformant against the Core Information Standard. They would do well to take a structured approach when going through the assessment. It is a big standard, incorporating a lot of information, but it’s essential to shared care records. We had to invest time on it, but the assessment helps you to put the theory into reality. The PRSB has done a lot of work on evidence-based practice and consultation, so we know it’s a trusted and needed standard.” 

With more system suppliers achieving conformance against the standard, they can achieve mutual understanding of what information should be in the record. However, the key to putting standards into practice is collaborative work. This includes working with customers, so that they can share their feedback with system suppliers.  

Orion Health is looking to continue to focus on PRSB’s standards conformance and test them with its clients. In addition to the Core Information Standard, the supplier achieved conformance against About Me. “At least seven more PRSB standards are relevant to us, so we would like to do more work around them”, says Ben.  

If you’re a health and care software supplier interested in achieving conformance against our standards and building more integrated care, find out more about our Standards Partnership Scheme.