NHSX’s Standards and Interoperability team have been tasked with driving forward the interoperability agenda by supporting the adoption of standards across the system. The PRSB welcomes this work and encourages the adoption of PRSB standards to reach full interoperability in the health and care system.

In their latest blogpost, the team have outlined key definitions for interoperability and standards, and their priorities and plans for this area of work. Interoperability happens when different digital systems can seamlessly exchange data across system and organisational boundaries, and NHSX’s blog recognises the necessity for commonly adopted information standards to achieve this. By creating interoperability through open-standards, critical health information can be exchanged accurately and safely at the point of need, which leads to safer and better patient outcomes.

‘The only way that tech can work in a complex health and care system is for clear, open standards to be set, effectively incentivised and enforced where appropriate’.

NHSX’s team are committed to improving the governance, framework and processes to support standards adoption and have established 5 key priorities to drive forward the agenda:

• A new end-to-end process and governance model for standards development
• Standards and Interoperability Strategy
• Open source playbook
• Long-term roadmap for standards and interoperability
• The standards portal.

You can read the full blog-post on NHSX’s website and we will be posting more updates as the team’s work progresses.