Hi all,
Kelly from Dorset here - I was wondering whether any other projects have made attempts at reaching out to individuals responsible for maintaining information being currently held in NHS Service Finder in their respective areas? It has been noted in Dorset that there is limited information on there at present re Voluntary and Community Sector organisations, however had little luck so far with them so far in terms of engagement/encouragement of adoption. @SimonDCP
Thanks in advance!
Hello Kelly. I’ve drawn this to the attention of someone who works with the NHS Service Finder. Also there is an NHS Standards person on the newly formed Cross-Government Open Referral UK Steering Group that will first meet in June. I’m hoping he will help align NHS directories with local government ones.
Hi all,
I help to run NHS Service Finder, and I would certainly say that the idea of integrating with other data sources via some sort of common interoperability model / data format is something we’re interested in, as Mike will attest.
Sadly budget and resources have been something of a barrier to investigating this any further so far, given the huge number of other streams of work we have on, but we hope to get there eventually. We’re currently nudging 100k registered users and tens of thousands of searches per day, so the scope for getting quality information to a wide audience of health and social care professionals is clearly there.
I’d be extremely interested to hear of any outcome regarding better alignment of these kind of directories, especially as some recent guidance I’m aware of is that NHS products should generally be using FHIR for interoperability, though I don’t know if that requirement would affect service directories.
In the meantime, if you’re an NHS Service Finder user, there are various feedback tools within the product to allow you to report missing services or information, and those reports help to inform the amazing national team of data professionals who maintain the information resources we use.
Hi @Martin welcome to the Open Referral network, great to have you join us here. I’m very curious to learn more about your work and to discuss the directory alignment challenge.
Also I noted your reference to FHIR and just want to make sure you see this piece about a project we supported last year to prototype an implementation guide for use of HSDS in FHIR: https://openreferral.org/hsds-is-now-interoperable-with-fhir/ ~ it’s for use in tandem with a specific profile developed by health insurance plans for their provider directories, but perhaps could be a helpful reference point for other profiles for other use cases such as yours.
It would be great to discuss further! Let me know if you might be interested in setting up a call 