Cegedim Healthcare Solutions and EMIS have a shared view of the future of interoperability, and set up a 50:50 joint venture in 2010 called Healthcare Gateway Ltd.
This company develops the Medical Interoperability Gateway (MIG), an automated brokerage service that can locate a patient record and facilitate an exchange of information between healthcare IT systems. In the UK, primary care is the home for the majority of patient medical records. EMIS and INPS systems hold the information for 75% of the UK population, and as the MIG is open to any willing participant, this figure could grow in the future. The MIG makes all of this primary care information available to The Vision 3 data hub.
MIG Data Flows
The MIG allows third-party solutions, such as out-of-hours systems, to request information for a given patient. The MIG will identify where the patient is registered and return detailed summary information (within the locally agreed scope), regardless of the clinical system being used at the patient’s practice. Third-party solutions can also use the MIG’s locator service to write additional clinical information to the patient’s record at their practice.
Why?
It is clear that patient safety and clinical outcomes can be improved if clinical systems share data. NHS Connecting for Health’s spine provides some of this functionality but is limited to practices in England and is not designed for local data sharing. Allowing systems to share data reduces the build-up of islands of data and reduces duplication. It also speeds up the flow of data compared to paper-based ‘snail mail’. The MIG is a data exchange rather than a store, providing a secure gateway to other services that provide real-time information to clinicians. It meets HL7 and NHS Connecting for Health interoperability standards.
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