The health and social care sector is currently experiencing a ‘boom’ of digital innovations, harnessing the power of data, increased connectivity and greater integration across different systems and settings, to improve the delivery of care. While it may seem that digital technology is key to driving these changes, it’s only a part of the solution. We also need to think about an agreed and consistent way of recording, storing and sharing data – and this is what standards help achieve.

Speaking on The role of standards in integrated care, a panel session chaired by PRSB’s CEO, Lorraine Foley at the Care Show, PRSB Patient Lead, Ojaih Willow, suggested: “Being able to share information is being able to participate in somebody’s own care – this underpins partnerships.” It’s hard to not agree with these words, as digital health data provides an opportunity to make health and care more personalised. In order to make it work, we need to facilitate the partnership between a person and providers by making information flow consistently, in a way that will help avoid frustrations and gain mutual understanding of a person’s needs and concerns.

Talking from her own experience, Ojaih added: “We need to think about how we feed information into the system, making it accessible and meaningful, while avoiding duplications. It is a problem when information is available, but not sharable. I have diabetes, and several procedures have been referred to me that I don’t need, as a result of such duplications.”

Imagine a scenario where you need to include information in the system only once to make it accessible and sharable across different health and social care digital platforms, in various locations – standards can help make it happen. Claire Sutton, Transformational Lead for The Independent Health and Social Care Sector at the Royal College of Nursing, agreed: “The key to making information shareable across all stakeholders is standards. Using them makes it much easier to share information about people who are receiving care. Transferring information from one system to another helps ensure the health and care providers who need it, can receive it immediately.”

While we’re seeing progress in the way that healthcare data is collected and structured, there has been less urgency in social care settings. Claire shared: “Social care is currently not very digitised and mostly uses a paper-based way to document information, which is challenging to feed it into the system. This is such a missed opportunity, as social care workers are excellent in knowing even the slightest details about the people they support. Providing them with digital solutions which are based on relevant information standards could help them bridge this gap and perform their work even more effectively.”

So, how do standards help achieve better integration and cohesion across health and social care? They include information that matters, which is what PRSB’s About Me standard embraces by allowing people to share information that they think is key to providing them with personalised and effective care. Expressing her thoughts on the standard, Jane Clark, Solution Owner at Graphnet, said: “We use About Me extensively – it’s repeatable across so many pathways of health and care. It helps start a dialogue between a person and a healthcare provider. Patients can finally feel they are not telling the same story over and over again.”

However, it is important to remember that information standards and digital technology should not be perceived as separate keys to integrated care, as agreed by Barbara Gale, Consultant and Clinical Lead for the ROSI Project: “Technology needs to work hand-in-hand with standards to make it all work.” At the same time, there should be a demand for a stronger collaboration between health and care professionals and system suppliers to make sure that digital technology is designed to bring tangible outcomes. “Co-designing and co-producing solutions is crucial – and this is how we’ve developed ROSI. It can be accessed by any professional, on any device”.

To help information standards become the norm in recording, holding and sharing data, we need to work on eliminating digital poverty and educate both patients and health and care providers how digital records can help transform a person’s care in combination with information standards, which are here to improve communication and ensure that the right decisions are made at the right time.