U.S. healthcare system is facing challenges with interoperability and now U.K. too faces similar issues. At the UK e-Health Week Conference, KLAS has released a detailed report on interoperability within the NHS. The researchers report that a considerable amount of patient data is being shared within the NHS through 61 local records shared across England.

The challenge that poses the healthcare sector in U.K. is that much of this sharing is restricted and cumbersome thus, a considerable amount of data falls outside the clinicians’ workflow. KLAS has defined the best standard of interoperability as consistent access to required and desired outpatient information, which can be located easily and viewed within the care record. But, this standard is tough to achieve across NHS.  

26% of organizations’ report or over one-quarter of them have no means in place to receive electronically outside patient data except for fax and core NHS Spine services. Another observation is that the acute care settings account for most of that gap.

30% i.e. one-third of the people who were polled in the health system, display data from other providers in the care record’s field or on a separate tab. 35% of them use portals to reveal data from other care providers and this represents the broadest type of data sharing today.

This is the scenario of interoperability in the UK but, the foremost challenge remains that patients don’t trust health organizations about keeping the data safe thus, hesitate to share it.