Ministry of Defence selects InterSystems to deliver on interoperability

The UK Ministry of Defence has selected InterSystems to make it easier for medics to access medical information.

Using InterSystems HealthShare and IRIS for Health platforms, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) plans to restore the current medical information services system on behalf of the Defence Medical Services.

The HealthShare interoperability platform will be used to normalise, aggregate and deduplicate data into a longitudinal unified care record for each patient, while IRIS for Health will be used to extract value from healthcare data and rapidly create and scale breakthrough applications.

The project is being run as part of Programme CORTISONE, with InterSystems expected to provide capabilities for an integration platform, CORTISONE portal, terminology service, enterprise master patient index, and provider directory.

The HealthShare unified care record will form centre of the new Defence Medical Information Systems and InterSystems IRIS for Health will allow the MoD to develop new Healthcare functionality rapidly as new requirements arise in the future.

Chris Norton, managing director UK & Ireland at InterSystems, said: “Our agile nature and strong track record collaborating with healthcare service providers means that we’re well placed to deliver innovative solutions in this open and integrated environment.

“InterSystems technology will deliver more integrated and valuable information to support improved health outcomes in serving personnel.”

The Defence Medical Services is staffed by 12,200 service personnel, plus 2,500 civilians “promote, protect, and restore” the health of more than 135,000 UK armed forces personnel.

The programme is a collaboration across all the Defence Services and aims to integrate and operate a full suite of COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) healthcare software and services from multiple healthcare suppliers.

InterSystems will also provide training and skills transfer, and collaborate effectively with the MoD and the suppliers who provide products, services and skilled resources to support delivery.

The MoD is moving towards a more digitised health and care system for its personnel. The news of InterSystems deployment follows the appointment of eConsult in June 2020 to provide online consultations across its 124 sites.

Around 183,500 military personnel were to have access to the online platform from sites based in the UK and across the globe.

As part of the mobilisation process, eConsult worked with the Ministry of Defence (MOD) teams to rapidly roll out online consultations to every MOD medical centre in the UK within just 24 hours to ensure all personnel have remote access to consultations during the Covid-19 pandemic.