The Situation:

The geographical expanse of NHS England made a challenge to determine the target architecture for its health and care data in the region. The ask was to assess and advise on England’s potential options for an open, cloud-based, layered data architecture and data sharing model to support business needs and provide societal benefits.

The Solution:

Tektology worked with the client to assess the potential methods for improved data liquidity nationally and across smaller health and care economies in England. Their objective was of enabling data for individuals and groups to be accessible in optimal forms including records for clinical decision making remains unchanged. As such, we were agnostic to a specific architecture and we considered what we have termed as best of breed, monolithic and federated architectures.

We created three key deliverables for the engagement which included an International Horizon Scan (IHS), a UK EPR Landscape and a Final Report. The team also engaged with global experts in the domain. These deliverables helped bring out the insights from the EPR implementations that have been touted as ‘Global Exemplars’. Further, the work also included dovetailing the briefs from a primary survey conducted with EPR system vendors in the UK.

Additionally, the team went above and beyond to recommend for the open health and care data architecture, steps on improving interoperability in England and suggestions on immediate next steps for NHS England for their journey towards an openEPR.

The Outcome:

The final report suggested developing and analysing a set of use cases to capture the real-world situations and processes that are hindered due to the lack of data liquidity. The client agreed that this will enable them to understand

the need for data liquidity in a way that means something real to all that would be involved

the exact requirements supporting the case for open health and care data architecture

Besides, this will help them build a foundation upon which the client organisation can apply, prioritise, and curate an executable plan that utilises the enablers for data liquidity listed in the final report.