NHS service standard – 17. Make your service interoperable

In an organisation as diverse and complex as the NHS, we need systems and services which talk to each other. Build for interoperability to share patient records and get data quickly from one place to another.

Why it's important

Connected systems make it easier for the public and health professionals to access and share the information they need. Interoperability helps make sure that data is communicated accurately and quickly and that patients get seamless care.

What you should do

Your team should be able to show that:

you follow this standard for interoperability and require your suppliers to follow it
you follow NHS England's API policies and best practice
you use agreed FHIR-based APIs (from NHS England's API and integration catalogue, filtered by FHIR) to join up care for patients
you use FHIR UK Core (NHS England) when building new APIs or migrating old APIs, for example to add significant new functionality
you keep pace with national API and interoperability standards changes
your APIs use structured data by default, HTML 5 optionally and no PDFs
you use synchronous REST APIs by default
if you present information to users in a specific format, you (not the system that sent the data) are responsible for this
you check the NHS standards directory for relevant standards
where appropriate, you use the NHS number (NHS England) to identify patients on APIs
for electronic care records, you use the structured clinical vocabulary SNOMED CT (NHS England)
for disease information in mortality and morbidity statistics, you use ICD-10 (the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, version 10)

Related service standard points

13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns

Guidance

GOV.UK resources

Help us improve this guidance

Share insights or feedback and take part in the discussion. We use GitHub as a collaboration space. All the information on it is open to the public.

If you've gone through a service assessment or peer review, we're especially interested to hear from you.

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Read more about how to feed back or share insights.

If you have any questions, get in touch with the service manual team.

Updated: January 2026