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Easing NHS staffing challenges through better use of data exchange and data quality technology
Addressing GP and nursing shortages requires NHS organisations to focus on interoperability infrastructure for data integration, identity, and clinical terminology, says Drew Ivan, Chief Strategy Officer, Rhapsody
Facing a deepening crisis of GP and nursing shortages, the call to ease clinician burden and burnout throughout the NHS has never been greater. Reducing sta ing shortages requires more than an attempt to add human resources. Instead, it’s necessary to use existing resources more e iciently and leverage them through interoperable systems.
Results from a recent HTN poll support this notion. When asked “If you could solve one challenge in the health tech industry, what would it be?” 42 per cent of respondents answered Integration/ Interoperability.
Alleviating the challenge depends on clinician access to and confidence in data quality to make timely, informed decisions about patient care. Prioritising health data management can help increase not only clinician e iciency but also patient engagement.
When transparent and reliable data is more easily accessible to patients through online portals and applications, they are empowered to stay involved in their care journey and enabled to use this information to make healthier decisions. A strong foundation of quality data impacts initiatives across the care continuum — and most importantly keeps patients healthy and out of traditional care settings.
What does a truly interoperable health and social care system look like?
It will happen with clean, timely, actionable data is accessible at the right time, in the right way, to the right people and systems. These systems include:
• Electronic health records (EHRs)
• Financial systems
• Remote patient monitoring systems
The problem is that these technologies don’t inherently integrate with one another, leaving healthcare providers and sta to do the manual work. Overcoming these interoperability roadblocks depends on the depth, breadth, speed, and flexibility of the underlying interoperability infrastructure.
As healthcare leaders consider what investments to make in interoperability infrastructure, they should consider how they plan to:
• Access and exchange data stored in di erent systems within and outside the care environment
• Positively identify patients at every point of encounter
• Map di erent clinical terminology and data sets, including unstructured data
• Choose an interoperability partner who understands all aspects of healthcare data interoperability
Essential infrastructure: An integration solution Integration involves accessing and exchanging data. Integration solutions, such as Rhapsody Integration Engine, help healthcare organisations move data among di erent systems, including routing, data transformation, and business rules.
In the absence of a best-of-breed integration engine built for healthcare, organisations across the NHS rely on manual processes to extract, compile, standardise, and pass data between disparate systems. This is a tedious, expensive, and error-prone administrative exercise that leaves data disconnected.
With the Rhapsody Integration Engine — also known as a Trust Integration Engine or TIE, NHS organisations aggregate and send data automatically, ensuring fast, accurate, and e icient exchange, unburdening health organisations by putting the right data in the right hands at the right time. More than 85 NHS trusts already use Rhapsody as their integration solution to support all healthcare message formats and standards, including HL7 (v2 and v3), HL7 FHIR®, CCDA, NCPDP, X12, IHE, DICOM, XML, and more.
Essential infrastructure: an enterprise master person Index (EMPI)
Identity involves understanding who you’re talking about — which patients and providers are related to the data you’re exchanging.
Inaccurate identification and disconnected records are a major challenge for health systems because they introduce ine iciencies, billing errors, data issues, poor experiences, and clinical or legal risk. Rhapsody EMPI addresses the datamatching process and reduces duplicate record creation by using advanced data science, iterated on in working with healthcare organisations around the globe.
Rhapsody EMPI enables positive identification of each person — including the patient’s past medical history — at the point of service for a better experience and ultimately improved outcomes. It achieves this by creating a common view of each person across the health and social care landscape and can easily incorporate national identifiers.
It connects to disparate systems via Rhapsody and open standard REST APIs, allowing downstream and upstream communication to synchronise the demographic record across multiple integrated HIEs, EHRs, regional and national systems. These APIs can be exposed to enable integration with biometric systems — for instance fingerprint, facial recognition, and palm print technologies — to further enhance positive ID. Third-party referential matching can also be invoked to further improve connectedness, where regulations allow.
Essential infrastructure: clinical terminology solution
Semantic interoperability involves knowing what you’re talking about. Rhapsody Semantic — a combined terminology solution, authoring tool, and FHIR terminology service — allows healthcare organizations to synthesise health records from more than one system and to analyse data.
To achieve a high level of interoperability, high-quality clinical information, and accurate analytics, all data sent by or received into a healthcare ecosystem should be mapped to a recognised standard. This enables you to achieve clinical expression by cross-mapping all major healthcare vocabularies, including diagnostic, lab, and procedure codes — and even unstructured data.
Rhapsody Semantic is one application and one source of truth that handles everything from metadata to content management, as well as all phases from development to publication, in consistent and proven workflows. It features code lookups, algorithmic mapping, electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM) value sets, condition subsets, and custom subsets.
How to choose an interoperability partner
As NHS leaders consider partners who can help ease sta ing shortages by smartly deploying interoperability solutions, look for one who:
• Supports any data standard
• Deploys where you want to — in the cloud, on-prem, or a hybrid of the two
• Right-sizes the services and support you receive
• Prioritises service and services experience
• Is fully committed to solving healthcare problems
• Meets your requirements, whether you want to develop operational skills to maintain integrations in-house or outsource them
• Helps connect caregivers to the data that they need when they need it, improving outcomes and optimising operations
• Increases confidence in insights by ensuring analytics are fed by the most complete and accurate data
• Navigates you away from pitfalls, and never leaves you exposed