Health Records Infrastructure Programme Ended

The NHS Information Authority (NHSIA) has confirmed to E-Health Insider that it has decided to suspend its Health Record Infrastructure (HRI) programme and halt development of live trials.

The decision to suspend work on the four HRI pilots before they go live was made by the NHS Information Authority earlier last week as a direct response to the procurement of an Integrated Care Records Service (ICRS) by the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), an NHSIA spokesperson told E-Health Insider.

Few details of the NHSIA’s HRI programme has been made available until recently, and it was never clear precisely how HRI fitted with the national ‘data spine’ and ICRS, currently being procured by the NPfIT.

First announced by NHSIA chief executive Gwyn Thomas in March 2002, HRI was conceived as a way to use web-technology to link together existing computer systems, holding patient information to create a virtual patient record. Initial piloting of the service was completed this April.

“This has been a valuable exercise and proved that disparate data sources can be linked and accessed effectively from one portal. However ICRS will provide a more sophisticated and broader framework and it is prudent for the NHS as a whole to concentrate resources on this,” stated the NHSIA spokesperson.

The spokesperson added: “Clinicians involved in the trials have been extremely positive about the benefits of sharing information online. Feedback from patients, who were able to look at their own personal health data, has also been favourable.”

The NHSIA’s HRI concept was intended to provide three core elements: a common interface, to a range of systems that contain person-based health information; a set of standards to enable various NHS systems to share person-based information; and a mechanism to record patient consent and provide this as a service to other NHS systems.

Development of HRI had been informed by the findings from the NHS Information Authority’s Electronic Health Record Implementation and Development Programme (ERDIP), with many personnel from the ERDIP programme contributing to HRI.

Correspondence seen by E-Health Insider, indicates that although the HRI programme has been suspended the HRI ‘product set’ developed will be maintained, so HRI could be re-established should the NPfIT require it in the future, “depending on the needs of the ICRS proof-of-solution testing.”