UK Core Access IG Initial Draft

HL7 UK are delighted to share the initial draft UK Core Access Implementation Guide (IG). UK Core Access describes how organisations can provide read-only access to health and care information within the UK, not only for direct care given to individuals but also for subject of care access. 

Ben McAlister, Chair, HL7 UK said “This publication builds upon the recent release of base profiles in the UK Core IG and represents a major milestone towards defining a minimum set of FHIR API capabilities for health and care systems to target. Implementation of these capabilities across health and care systems in the UK has the potential to transform the delivery of direct care to individuals across a wide range of settings.  Implementation also gives subjects of care the ability to actively participate in putting their own health and care data to use.”

Providing a common baseline will benefit organisations that provide health and care services as well as suppliers of IT systems. Through common information exchange, the IG also allows for innovative applications within health and care that can be more widely and efficiently developed and deployed. 

David Hancock, Chair, techUK Interoperability Working Group, said “The work that HL7 UK has done on creating the UK Core Access Implementation Guide is a vital part of driving open interoperability standards across Health and Care.  Despite all the work being done on the definition of the content of UK Core, what has been missing is the definition of standard methods of accessing the UK Core content, and this has undoubtedly slowed down adoption of UK Core.  I hope the UK Core Access Implementation Guide will be adopted by all EPR and other healthcare software vendors, as through this, we will drive the adoption of HL7 FHIR and UK Core across the UK.”

Both the development build of UK Core Access and the source files are available online for you to review today. We would welcome your feedback on the draft implementation guide before it is further developed. You can provide comments as issues on the repository or by email. For each comment, please include the page address and section number, a description and a proposed change. 

We would like feedback on or before Tuesday 30th May, after which we will use these comments to improve UK Core Access.