Recommendation 4

To deliver the digital Vision, NHS organisations’ IT systems must be interoperable. Many of the standards required to enable this are not yet in place, and much work is required before benefits, such as digital-image sharing, can be realised. NHSE&I increasingly seeks to plan and coordinate patient care through local partnerships of health and care organisations, making data sharing between organisations essential. Currently, many local organisations rely on legacy systems that are unable to do this, so these systems need to be upgraded. But at May 2020 only three of the 10 sets of standards for achieving interoperability, identified by NHS Digital, were ready and NHSX could not tell us when the others would be ready. Interoperability will also help the NHS to make good use of the cloud which could, for example, benefit patients, radiologists and consultants by facilitating the sharing of digital images. Recommendation: NHSX should urgently bring forward the remaining standards in order to provide clarity for trusts and suppliers, including providing trusts with guidance on the potential use of the cloud to enable digital image sharing. Digital transformation in the NHS 7