Keynote Presentation

NAVIGATING THE STANDARDS MAZE – THE ENGLISH EXPERIENCE By Dr Paul A Amos BSc, MB BS, Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care in England, UK

Abstract:

We all know and understand that in an increasingly interconnected health and social care environment it is critical that
we share relevant information about individual patients and clients to support their care. In addition we look forward to
the time when information collected and stored within the individuals health and social care record might be used in its
anonymised and aggregated form to support management of the service and inform relevant health and social care
strategy and policy decision making.
The use of standards are a pre-requisite in our bid to enable implementability, interoperability and most importantly
patient safety, however as is often quoted “The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from”
to which I would add, “and if I can’t find one I like, I’ll make up my own!” How then do we navigate our way through
the maze of often diverse and competing standards such that our vision can be turned into a reality which is both cost
effective and achievable in our lifetime?
In order to provide direction and guidance on the development and use of standards in England we have created
the Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care (ISB) whose primary role is to appraise and where
appropriate approve standards for use within Health and Social care. These standards include: technical standards such
as pseudonymisation, bar codes and messaging, management information standards such as collections and groupings
to support management of the service, clinical information standards to support clinical record keeping and human
behavioural standards to support information governance.
This discussion will explore the role and governance of the ISB, the type of standards addressed and how they
might be grouped and organised in a meaningful suite to support the needs of users and system developers. ISB
recommends to prospective standards developers a Standards Development Methodology which will be shared along
with the appraisal and approval process.
In order to demonstrate how the ISB approaches Information Standards development, implementation and maintenance
the notion of ‘concept of operation’ will be discussed and demonstrated by looking at an example of the end to end
process for a data standard.

KEYWORDS
Standards, Interoperability, Implementability, Safety

Bio:

Following a short period as a farm manager Paul attended Newcastle upon Tyne University where he first studied and
then taught in the department of agricultural engineering. During this time he nurtured an interest in medicine culminating
in attendance and then graduation from the Newcastle Medical School in 1984.
A period of 6 years was spent practicing medicine in various hospital and general practice posts during which he became increasingly interested in the use of computers to support clinical care. An opportunity arose to work with Dr James Read
in the development, support and implementation of Read Codes within general practice systems which formed the basis
of his current career in Health Informatics.
Since 1990 Paul has pursued 2 main interests within Health Informatics. Firstly the development, maintenance and implementation of clinical terminologies, initially with the Read Codes followed by SNOMED CT. He is an active member
of the UK Terminology Centre Edition Committee and the International Health Terminology Standards Development
Organisation (IHTSDO) Quality Assurance Committee.
Secondly the adoption and use of Health Information Standards to support patient care through his work as a Domain
Lead in the Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care (ISB) in England. This role includes the appraisal of proposed technical and data standards, support of standards developers and as a member of the ISB Board, the
approvals body for standards for use within the NHS in England.
 

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