Call for single body to set standards

The UK needs to set up a single non-government organisation for health informatics standards to replace the range of bodies that currently exist, eHealth Insider Live 2010 heard this morning.

Tim Benson, founder of healthcare computing business Abies, told the conference that there was currently a “mish-mash of standards bodies”; including international standards bodies, industry bodies, UK non-governmental organisations and UK government organisations.

He said: “The existing structure is dysfunctional and what we clearly need is a single, UK, non-governmental organisation to be responsible for informatics standards.

"There needs to be central funding and these other organisations need to be told point blank that they have no future.”

Benson said Canada’s Infoways Standards Collaborative was a model that the UK could follow.

He explained this was set up and funded by the Canadian government, but given an independent and highly transparent remit to develop standards to meet the country’s needs.

He added: “I think with that kind of body we would be a bit better off than with 30 or 40 organisations who seem to spend most of their time worrying about demarcation and turf wars.”

However, Benson warned that delivering standards would need long term funding and should be done in the expectation it would take time.

He also told EHI Live 2010 that he believed the government’s white paper ‘Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS’ was going to bring about an information

“Maybe the information strategy document was thoroughly boring, but the idea in the white paper of patient-centric care is an information revolution.”

He argued that the focus of information in the NHS would switch from information for accountability to information to promote an exchange between the patient and their clinician.

However, he said that none of the IT systems currently in use by the NHS were able to deliver the most important key performance indicator of the future – which would be patient outcomes.

Benson also argued that patient administration systems would become obsolete in the next ten years.

He added: “In the next decade the need for replacing a PAS with another PAS is something we will need to think very hard indeed about.”

Benson also told the conference that coding should only be used where it was essential and where everyone was going to input the codes.

He added: “I think we use codes a bit too much. We only need codes if we are going to count things or compare things in which case you need everyone to do it. Incomplete coding is useless.”

About the speaker: Tim Benson is the author of “Principles of Health Interoperability HL7 and SNOMED”, Springer 2010.