Joining Forces to Enhance Care Delivery

The PRSB, INTEROPen, and the Royal College of Physicians have formalised a new official partnership, enhancing our joint commitment to improving information sharing across health and social care.

On 22 May, Lorraine Foley, CEO of the PRSB, Luke Readman, Co-Chair of INTEROPen, and Dr Ian Bullock, CEO of the Royal College of Physicians, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)  agreeing to ‘work together to advance sharing between systems across the NHS and social care. This will be done through the engagement of clinicians and care professionals patient/carer representatives, vendors and informaticians’.

The PRSB, INTEROPen and the RCP have taken this decision to formally recognise the strengths that each party brings to addressing the challenge of creating interoperable information systems across health and social care. The organisations have agreed to work as trusted partners in an open and transparent business relationship to develop collaborative, value for money standards in response to customer needs across health and social care.

Importantly, the partnership aims to ensure that professional standards are adopted into everday practice to improve the information-sharing that underpins safe and effective care and that they use open standards, such as INTEROPen CareConnect FHIR profiles.

Each organisation brings unique strengths to the partnership: PRSB is the voice of more than 40 clinical, professional and patient representative bodies on standards for the content of care records; RCP offers expertise in the development of standards and unique access to its clinical experts, and INTEROPen has formed to bring these key interoperability stakeholders together, including more than 140 vendor organisations and techUK, to focus on the development of the interoperability specifications which vendors have signed up to implement to ensure better real-time structured and coded information sharing across health and care systems.

PRSB on Twitter