As a supplier to the NHS, I am personally very proud to be working with an organisation that offers what is said to be the gold standard of clinical care. It has to be said that it is this level of care commitment to making the NHS work that fuels Premier IT as a business, and we are nothing but eminently grateful that it exists. Having said this when I put on my systems hat and look again I can’t help to think that there has to be a better way. I visited a trust last week and was dismayed to hear that they had over 200 different IT systems. This was perplexing on its own but to then hear that very few of the systems actually talk to each other was the real resonating point.
Three years ago Premier IT had a number of market-leading products which all prospered individually, however they lacked the connections with each other to allow us to join the various elements of our business together. We had systems that covered the areas of revalidation, appraisal, job planning, training management, CPD, e-learning all of which could mesh cohesively with one another. It was at this point that we decided that true interoperability was to be a key part of our business going forward and in order to progress within the NHS, we had to be a champion of this cause.
When the Carter report landed in 2016 we were excited to see that our vision was being shared by the NHS and that our continued endeavour in the area of interoperability would be appreciated amongst our user community. It is this knowledge that has spurred us on into the creation of various tools such as our authentication servers/multipurpose apps/material design framework/learning record store amongst many others which we hope will put us at the forefront of this movement. We actively encourage working with other systems in order to produce the best results for our health service and ultimately the patients within it.
When looking at suppliers from the private sector it’s sometimes very easy to see them as a faceless profit-making organisation. However, scratch the surface at Premier IT and you will find individuals who like anyone else are reliant on the British infrastructure and especially the NHS for their wellbeing. If we can improve the NHS even a little bit by saving our users time and effort so that can continue to provide high-quality clinical care then we should and we will. It is for this reason that for us interoperability really does start at home.