New deal to improve data sharing across organisations

NHS Digital has signed a deal that will make mapping clinical and administrative codes between different health and care organisations faster and easier thanks to a new terminology server.

Signed with DXC Technology and CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, the deal provides a single-supplier procurement framework that will give health and care organisations across the UK an efficient route to procure a terminology server. Overtime, this will improve clinical safety as health and care organisations and suppliers, can chose to have access to a consistent terminology mapping capability to support integrated care.

The agreement will allow buyers to share code system reference data from a central NHS Digital Terminology Server, enabling easier integration of local coding systems with national and international coding languages.

CSIRO developed Ontoserver to match up common variations in clinical terminologies to help the different clinical coding software talk to each other.  It’s a ‘back end’ solution, building on the NHS Digital's data register service. The solution will use the international FHIR standards to process codes, their descriptions and interrelationships, including complex queries. The terminology server acts as a translation service and will support other tools such as the NHS Data Dictionary, which provides a reference point for information standards, such as the standard for how a date of birth or clinical conditions should be recorded, to support integrated health and care activities within the NHS in England.

This gives users more flexibility in choosing the clinical terminologies and code systems that fit their needs. It will also help to supply reference data for NHS Digital’s Trusted Research Environment, a service that provides approved researchers with access to essential linked, de-identified reference health data.

Nicholas Oughtibridge, Principle Data Architect at NHS Digital said: “Recording data once and then reconciling, comparing and sharing the data safely has been a long-standing challenge across the NHS. Ontoserver has the potential to transform the way in which data is captured, shared and analysed across health and care.

“The capabilities that Ontoserver delivers are key to enabling data from disparate systems to be safely and meaningfully exchanged between care providers, researchers and service planners. NHS data is already a valuable tool in fighting disease and finding new courses of treatment, but having access to more localised data, more quickly will have a real boost for researchers.”