About standards

What we mean by standards

This service contains standards, which we group into 4 categories:

• A Collection is a systematic gathering of a specified selection of data or information for a particular stated purpose from existing records held within health and care systems and electronic devices.

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• An Extraction is a type of collection that is pulled from an operational system by the data controller and transmitted to the receiver without additional processing or transcription by the sender..

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• Technical standards and specifications specify how to make information available technically including how the data is structured and transported

Browse technical standards and specifications.

• Information standards are agreed ways of doing something, written down as a set of precise criteria so they can be used as rules, guidelines, or definitions.

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Not every standard that exists is listed in this service. You can find out which standards are included.

Benefits of using standards

There are many benefits to using standards including:

• it’s more efficient to reuse existing approaches to recording or exchanging data than creating new ones
• it promotes quality by ensuring all care settings are aligned to standards that have been approved by qualified bodies
• it makes it easier to analyse data at the national level and see trends or problems if the data has all been standardised
• it is essential to achieving interoperability, which would allow IT systems across the country to share data. An example of this is hospitals being able to update GP records directly using their own systems instead of sending emails

Report a gap in standards

Work is underway to publish a process for people developing new standards.

In the meantime, please notify us of plans to create new standards by emailing england.interop.standards@nhs.net. Local standards that apply at the national level may be uplifted for national use.