For the past 20 years, Mayden has been creating insightful and interoperable healthcare software, working with over 30 partners. Fiona (Fi) Dawson, Director at Mayden, has led the curation of these partnerships for the past 5 years. This is both in terms of the relationships and the data and technical requirements. But how does Mayden define interoperability and how does it support the wider healthcare ecosystem?
Fi is an advocate for the health informatics profession – both as a BCS Fellow and FEDIP Leading Practitioner. Therefore, she is passionate about what technology can do to support healthcare, and in particular, mental health.
How does Mayden define interoperability?
You can define interoperability in healthcare as when different systems connect and exchange information securely with one another. Patients often engage with various health and social care services during their diagnosis, treatment, and recovery from mental health conditions. At Mayden, we recognise the need for interoperability between clinical systems across the NHS. Furthermore, the range of digital therapeutic interventions that are in use in services continues to grow.
Although definitions of interoperability are varied, the notion of systems “working together” is fairly consistent. However, we at Mayden believe that isn’t just about sharing demographic data using a mandated standard.
“For me, working together is not just about transacting data. Instead, how can we go beyond this to share information and insights so that clinicians are better able to support patients and patients get better outcomes?”
Fi Dawson, Director, Mayden
Fi was recently invited to speak at TechUk’s Interoperability Podcast. This allowed her to showcase her technical expertise, dataset standards experience in mental health and network across systems and suppliers
techUK was delighted to be joined by Andrew Frangleton, Clinical Architecture, Fiona Dawson, Mayden, Alex Eavis, EMIS and Jon Payne, InterSystems to discuss interoperability within the healthcare system, the current challenges and some potential solutions to the problem too!
Mayden has extensive experience of interoperability projects working across the healthcare ecosystem, from large Electronic Patient Record (EPR) systems to digital health apps. Mayden is a member of INTEROpen and actively engaged in the TechUK health tech community, recently hosting the South West roundtable
Improving interoperability in healthcare, together
Interoperability in healthcare has trust at its heart, both at an organisational level as well as a data and technical level. Recent global attacks on health tech have highlighted that in order to ensure trust, cyber security must feature in our approach to interoperability. Bringing together the TechUK communities in health tech and cyber security would help build an informed and robust approach to trusted partnerships, providing benefit to members, NHS services and patients alike.
“Let's get the basics done, then move beyond that to work together as an industry and together realise the true potential of interoperability for the benefit of us all.”
Fi Dawson, Director, Mayden
Mayden prioritises interoperability between our EPR, iaptus, and other providers of digital tools; whether that’s patient facing health apps or specialist clinical software.
If you are interested in partnering with us on an interoperability project, please get in touch.