Interview with Monica Jones, chief data officer, University of Leeds and Associate Director, HDR UK North
Quality healthcare depends on open standards
As Chief Data Officer at the University of Leeds and Associate Director at HDR UK North, Monica Jones champions open standards like openEHR as fundamental to healthcare data quality. She emphasises how open platforms such as vitagroup’s HIP address a long-standing frustration in healthcare by separating data from applications, allowing information to flow freely between systems.
What’s openEHR’s role in ensuring data availability?
The role that openEHR plays as an open standard, I think is, is very important. I believe in using open standards, whether that’s clinical terminology such as SNOMED CT, whether it’s using interoperability standards like HL 7 FHIR or actually using common data models such as openEHR.
I always say that you can’t have quality without standards. And so therefore, being able to get to a place of good quality, you need things like openEHR. The fact that it’s starting to be adopted globally in such an exciting way is great to see it all coming to fruition. I think that opportunity to get that consistency, but also to separate the data layer from the platforms, the frustration that people have had for many years – I’ve worked in the NHS for many years before my, my current role working for the university – has been very much around that wanting to be able to use the data separately from the platforms themselves where potentially you can get proprietary lock in, where you can’t actually see the data and openEHR as a standard liberates that. So it’s really important.
How is vitagroup’s HIP contributing to openEHR adoption?
I think using systems such as vitagroup HIP is actually a way of accelerating adoption. Sometimes some of the barriers to adopting open standards such as openEHR has been “Well, where do I start? How do I take what seem to be a very sort of academic subject and turn it into reality in my hospital, in my integrated care system?” So, working with companies such as vitagroup, who have brought it together in a very accessible platform, people go, “ah, that’s how it works” and “I feel that I can actually be brave enough to take that step.”
Obviously, there are other suppliers in the market, but I think I’ve certainly seen a step change over the past few years because of companies like vitagroup actually grasping the standard and taking it forward.
