DH wants ISO equivalent for health information

Tags: DH NHS Choices NHS Direct Quality Social care

24 Oct 2008

The Department of Health is looking for an organisation to run a scheme to accredit health and social care information in England.

It has issued a tender for a “fully managed service” to apply a national health and social information standard to information production systems. It hopes this will do for them “what ISO did for business management systems.”

The tender says the DH is looking for three things: a standard that defines the information production system an organisation uses to produce information; certification procedures leading to the award of a quality mark; and support for organisations to attain and retain the mark.

The tender also says quality mark will “provide a nationally recognised way to reassure people that the information they access is from a reliable source.”

Finding a way to “kite-mark” healthcare information has been a pre-occupation of health policy makers, worried that people will fail to find “reliable” information in a mass of search engine results.

The tender says the new service will directly support the national policy of tailoring services to the preferences of patients, and that it is particularly important in the context of Lord Darzi’s review of the NHS, which emphasised the need to make new types of information available to support quality and choice.

The DH suggests there are about 50,000 organisations in England producing healthcare information and that interest in the new scheme is “high” – but that participation in the new scheme will be encouraged by subsidies for a limited period.

The new scheme is due to start next August. The value of the tender is estimated at between £3m and £6.5m, but the DH hopes the scheme will develop as a “self sustaining business model.”

Meanwhile, steps are being taken to rationalise government health information sites. The NHS’s two main, national websites, NHS Choices and NHS Direct, will join forces to provide a comprehensive “front door” to online health information services from the end of October.

“By integrating the online services of NHS Direct and NHS Choices, the NHS will have the most comprehensive online health information service available anywhere,” says a note on the NHS Direct website.

The sites will use the www.nhs.uk web address. NHS Direct will continue to provide a telephone service on 0845 4647 for the public and patients.

Link

Management of a scheme to accredit health and social care information

Lyn Whitfield

Reader's Comments

So what's the ISB for?

24 Oct 08 09:10

So what does the NHS Information Standards Board do then? If the DH believes that this body isn't up to the job then it should disband it forthwith and save the taxpayer some money.

Still trying to kitemark the westwind?

24 Oct 08 12:10

The idea of quality kitemarking patient information has been knocking around for at least ten years. Not so long ago the DH was funding something called the Centre for Health Information Quality. Their 'kitemark' still adorns one or two websites (see http://www.medicdirect.co.uk/). Following the demise of CHIQ, the DH were supposedly developing a kitemarking process in house. It now looks like they want to contract this out again.

The fact that there is still little consensus about how kitemarking ought to be done and who ought to be doing it speaks volumes. Interest in the scheme from information producers may well be 'high', but I suspect the vast majority are looking for post-hoc validation of their products and won't want to adapt their methods significantly.

Producing information, inside and outside the NHS is usually done on a shoestring by people with little or no experience of editorial management or evaluating research evidence. Changing that is going to take significant amounts of money - well beyond that promised by this contract.

Many of the reasons that kitemarking might not be practical were outlined in a prescient BMJ editorial by Tony Delamothe entitled 'Kitemarking the westwind?' (see http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/321/7265/843). Little has changed.

CE mark

24 Oct 08 14:10

There already is an accreditation process which is recognised across Europe and is administered by the MHRA in the UK. This is the CE mark which can be applied to medical software.

Defining terms

24 Oct 08 16:10

The OJEU notice says the scheme is open to 'organisation producing written or scripted health and social care information relevant for people (service users/carers/citizens) in England.'

So we're talking about the producers of leaflets, books, websites etc that give patients information about conditions, treatments, medications, the experience of illness, coping strategies, sources of support etc.

Which puts this outside the area of both the ISB and the CE process. This is about quality assuring an editorial / content management process, not about data or patient records.