For our latest poll we asked our audience: what’s the biggest challenge with interoperability across health and care?
We put forward four possible answers – a lack of a national strategy, suppliers and systems, the need for dedicated funding to support interoperability, or the reality of organisations solving challenges alone.
31 percent of respondents believed that the lack of national strategy is the biggest challenge for interoperability, with voters including deputy chief medical officer, associate director for clinical informatics, digital programme manager and chief clinical information officer.
Close behind, 29 percent of voters said that the biggest challenge is the need for dedicated funding to support interoperability. We saw votes here from roles such as PCN digital and transformation lead, deputy chief nurse and innovation consultant.
Next up, 24 percent voted that suppliers and systems can pose the biggest challenge; votes came in from roles including matron, EPR configuration analyst and project manager.
Finally, 16 percent of our respondents selected the option of organisations solving challenges alone. For this response, voters included head of digital transformation, GP and nurse.
Which would you have chosen?
In other news around interoperability, in March we highlighted how the Department of Health and Social Care published a prior information notice highlighting an opportunity for market engagement activities around the planned procurement of an interoperability platform to support adult social care. The platform or services will be intended to support data sharing between digital social care record systems in care homes, nursing homes and domiciliary care, and systems used by NHS providers including GPs, hospitals, community services and social care.
We highlighted updates to three Google Cloud solutions aiming to support healthcare and life sciences organisations in enabling interoperability, building stronger data foundations and deploying generative AI tools in the hopes of improving patient outcomes. Read more here.
HTN also explored the ‘Interoperability Saves Lives’ report from The Alberta Virtual Care Coordinating Body, which identifies several factors believed to be hampering provincial progress in health data interoperability and making recommendations on legislation, design, assurance, and oversight.
