What ITK can do for an NHS Organisation?

ITK2 has been functionally enhanced significantly over the previous version. ITK now has the capability to support any document type and as such provides the opportunity to transport any document type whether that is a Discharge Summary, an A&E letter or an Out of Hours summary.

This offers NHS trusts and organisations not only the potential for significant cost savings but also provides the opportunity to effectively share clinical documents electronically across organisational boundaries and thus address a key business and clinical need.

The diagram below illustrates that within the NHS there is what could be termed a 'matrix of maturity' when it comes to the electronic transfer of clinical correspondence such as a discharge summary.

• Level 0: Various transports carrying PDF, TIFF, Kettering
• Level 1: ITK Transport Layer carrying existing documents (as above) over ITK Transport
• Level 2: ITK Transport Layer carrying CDA documents
• Level 3: ITK Transport Layer carrying CDA documents with clinically assured content

ITK R2 has been designed in such a way that it provides the opportunity to maximise the investment in existing systems and infrastructure by facilitating the transfer of simple text based documents such as PDFs whilst providing the opportunity for organisations to over time, progress to a greater level of functional maturity by adopting a structured HL7 v3 CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) document type.

In providing this broad level of support ITK R2 is well aligned with a number of NHS clinical initiatives such that it can easily provide the support for both existing and emerging clinical professional guidelines and standards on clinical content.

Why consider CDA, what are the advantages?

ITKv2 provides a convenient mechanism for NHS organisations to move to and benefit from the use of CDA. The advantage of establishing a CDA based clinical document is that the complexity of a document can be matched to the complexity of the material to be carried within it.

This allows for a progression from the use of the very simple documents to those of a more complex nature when support for these is available. As such the ability to utilise a single approach to transfer a variety of document types.

As well as providing generic level CDA support ITK R2 comes complete with five defined CDA templates for key clinical documents including discharge summaries, A&E letters, outpatient letters, out of hours and community reports.

ITKv2 has been constructed in such a way that adding additional correspondence types to future release of the ITK can now be achieved with minimal impact on the overall specifications.