BCS & the IHEor

the trouble with standards

Ian Herbert

Vice Chair, British Computer Society Health Informatics Forum

The Requirement

Care increasingly cooperative

Patients & HCPs increasingly mobile

Information must follow the patient, and mean the same wherever it is

Suppliers don’t want to have to design a specific mechanism for each interaction with each different system

Purchasers don’t want to be locked in to a particular supplier □

We need semantic interoperability

Standards vital, but must be used

This means enforcement / accreditation

Standards should cover: Physical interconnection Application interconnection Patient data & knowledge representation □

The Solution

The Players

Hence the current push behind standards development by :

CEN in Europe Snomed CT internationally HL7 multinationally OpenEHR multinationally ISO, W3C as world bodies national bodies eg ANSI, Continua, BSI □

The Result

Many standards – take your pick They do not share a common underpinning semantic model, so: Their scopes overlap There are gaps There are competing standards There are some semantic conflicts

Many difficult to use, e.g. HL7 v3 □

The Fix?

Need to profile standards deployment to remove scope overlaps

Need to agree common underpinning framework

Need to plug the gaps

Needs to be done across standards bodies

But also need to demonstrate that the standards work, e.g. by implementing real significant interoperability scenarios □

Enter IHE

IHE a world-wide organisation

It implements real & significant interoperability scenarios by:

Selecting & profiling relevant standards Publishing the specification Demonstrating the results publicly □

IHE & BCS

We welcome IHE UK into BCS HIF

IHE sees this as helping them extend their mission into work outside imaging

It contributes to BCS HIF’s mission to develop the full potential of health informatics

Thank you □