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 work to open standards and the Technology Code of Practice
you have checked the NHS data standards directory for relevant standards
you maximise flexibility and make content, tools and services available to more people through well-designed APIs, following the API policies and best practice (NHS Digital)
you use agreed FHIR-based APIs (from NHS Digital's API catalogue, filtered by FHIR) to join up care for patients
where appropriate, you use the NHS number (NHS Digital) and NHS data registers and comply with NHS clinical information standards
for disease information in mortality and morbidity statistics, you use ICD-10 (the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases, version 10)
for electronic care records, you use the structured clinical vocabulary SNOMED CT (NHS Digital)
if you create any data sets that could be useful to others, you publish them in an open machine-readable format, under an Open Government Licence, unless they contain personally identifiable information, sensitive information, or where publishing the data would infringe the intellectual property rights of someone outside the NHS or government
if you use barcodes or similar identifiers, you comply with the GS1 barcodes standard as set out in Scan4Safety
where relevant, you comply with the standards published by the Open Standards Board (GOV.UK)

Guidance

GOV.UK resources

In the GOV.UK service standard, open standards are part of point 13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns.

Here are some useful 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.

Feedback or share insights on GitHub

Read more about how to feedback or share insights.

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

Updated: April 2023