HSCI Guidance 10: Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) and Social Care

HSCI Guidance 10 / ITK and social care / 5 October, 2011 / v2 Final HSCI Guidance 10: Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) and social care

Summary The NHS Interoperability Toolkit (ITK) is a set of national standards, frameworks and implementation guides to support message exchange within local organisations and across local health and social care communities. Although there are no explicit restrictions on the use of ITK by social care organisations or their IT suppliers, ITK is still being piloted and future funding and management arrangements have yet to be agreed by Department of Health and NHS Informatics leaders. ITK is not a piece of software or a product that can be downloaded. Instead, those intending to use ITK should download the specification and guidance documents (see below on how to do this) and use them as the basis for designing local system developments. It is anticipated that by publishing common specifications and policing their deployment through the ITK accreditation scheme, a level of standardisation will be achieved in terms of system interoperability.

Scope of ITK Support for more complex implementation scenarios ITK Release 1.1 provided support for simple message interaction (e.g. basic one- way message transmission such as hospital discharge summaries) between pre- defined and configured endpoints. ITK Release 2 rounds this out with support for more complex scenarios i.e.:  Acknowledgements at both the infrastructure and business level  Addressing and Routing services Correspondence A key focus of ITK R2 has been to lay the groundwork for clinical document exchange. This has included specifying a set of generic services for document transmission - including the ability to carry attachments. This has been developed into a maturity model to support varying approaches, ranging from a basic human-readable PDF right through to fully coded Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents. Some specific document content has been defined for ITK R2. It is anticipated further document content definitions may be added in future releases.

HSCI Guidance 10 / ITK and social care / 5 October, 2011 / v2 Final

Spine Mini Services The final focus of ITK R2 has been the use of ITK Web Services to simplify access to a limited range of Spine services. The Spine mini services specifications will enable suppliers to build middleware applications that can carry out a limited range of transactions with the Spine such as using read-only access to PDS to check a patient’s NHS Number or demographics. In this way, other systems will have easy access to some Spine functionality via ITK connections, but the middleware layer will protect the integrity of the Spine itself. Unlike other aspects of ITK, systems using Spine mini services will be interacting directly with the Spine and suppliers will need to go through some form of Spine assurance, although new approaches to this are currently being piloted.

Accessing ITK specification documents ITK specifications are made available by NHS Connecting for Health through the Terminology Reference Update Distribution (TRUD) service: TRUD registration is at: http://www.uktcregistration.nss.cfh.nhs.uk/trud3 Anyone wishing to download the specifications must register with TRUD and then subscribe to some or all of the ITK services. The specification documents can then be downloaded from an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site. Details of how to do this are supplied once you have subscribed to a service.

Participating in ITK development Suppliers and their customers are encouraged to participate in the development of ITK. The mechanism for this is the Health ICT Portal where there are separate forums for both NHS organisations and all-comers. In this context, ‘NHS’ should be interpreted as health and social care and their suppliers, and it is expected that the ‘NHS’ forum will be the most active. The portal is an industry-led site and is not connected to NHS CFH. The Health ICT Portal is at: http://www.healthictportal.com/ To use the forums, you must register with the portal then register with either the NHS or Open ITK forum. Documents and discussion threads can then be accessed on the forum part of the site.

CAF Demonstrator Sites – prerequisites for using ITK Those Common Assessment Framework (CAF) Demonstrator sites that are considering the possibility of using ITK in their local developments should bear the following in mind before committing to any specific course of action. To develop a successful information sharing project using ITK, the following are required:

HSCI Guidance 10 / ITK and social care / 5 October, 2011 / v2 Final

1. A social care IT supplier that can develop their system to incorporate an ITK interface to support the relevant HSCI messaging within the necessary timescales; 2. An NHS IT supplier that can develop their system to incorporate an ITK interface to support the relevant HSCI messaging within the necessary timescales; 3. Access to a common patient identifier such as NHS number from a reliable source, for example, PDS, the Demographics Batch Service (DBS) or via middleware using Spine mini-services. Whilst it is possible to use locally defined identifiers, the NHS Number is recommended; 4. The ability to develop suitable addressing, routing and discovery infrastructure locally to support reliable messaging; 5. Resources and expertise to carry out assurance processes in line with the guidance included in the ITK specifications (as of 4/08/2011 these have not yet been published). Without these prerequisites, sites are advised to look at simpler information sharing options such as the use of secure email.

Support Information and contacts for ITK support is available on the public NHS CFH website at: http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/systemsandservices/interop or from the ITK mailbox: [email protected] To coincide with the release of ITK2 in July 2011, the ITK team are interested in talking to suppliers interested in developing local proof of concept projects. Contact should be made via the [email protected] mailbox.