DoH CIO outlines government prescription for NHS data

Developing an information strategy is more important to improving healthcare than developing a technology strategy, according to Department of Health CIO Christine Connelly, who was speaking at the health informatics conference HC2011 in Birmingham earlier this week.

"Information will persist where technology has changed and been updated and can help boost outcomes and innovation in the long term," she said.

Connelly gave some clues as to what the final version of the DoH’s "Liberating the NHS, An Information Revolution" strategy would contain.

• The DoH would pledge to capture information as close to the source as possible.

• Work would be done to make coding uniform across the NHS.

• Where data is extracted for collation it will continue to be connected to a patient ID, thereby tackling information control issues.

• Systems would also be made interoperable.

• The strategy should take advantage of the NPfIT infrastructure already in place.

She also explained that developers looking to create software using NHS data should be working within the NHS Interoperability Toolkit ITK, and that all data held on the NHS Spine will eventually be migrated for use in this system.


The ITK will see the development and delivery of a set of technical standards and frameworks for interoperability, covering transactional and analytical services.