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NHS Number Open Source Software: Implications for Digital Health Regulation and Development

NHS Number Open Source Software: Implications for Digital Health Regulation and Development A national example of open source digital healthcare is critiqued. The code for implementing numeric patient identifiers is surprisingly naïve and bug-ridden, despite patient identifiers being computationally trivial and a critical component of reliable healthcare. The issues raised are shown to be widespread, long term, and apparently unrecognized. Problems are traced back to inadequacies in the relevant standards, and, at every stage, regulation through to development, inadequate Software Engineering input. An important finding is that the relevant healthcare standards are inconsistent and written without sufficient rigor to be at all constructive for implementing digital systems. The widely recognized problems of interoperability may be traced back to diverse (and buggy) interpretations of vague standards. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (HEALTH) Association for Computing Machinery

NHS Number Open Source Software: Implications for Digital Health Regulation and Development

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
ISSN
2691-1957
eISSN
2637-8051
DOI
10.1145/3538382
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

A national example of open source digital healthcare is critiqued. The code for implementing numeric patient identifiers is surprisingly naïve and bug-ridden, despite patient identifiers being computationally trivial and a critical component of reliable healthcare. The issues raised are shown to be widespread, long term, and apparently unrecognized. Problems are traced back to inadequacies in the relevant standards, and, at every stage, regulation through to development, inadequate Software Engineering input. An important finding is that the relevant healthcare standards are inconsistent and written without sufficient rigor to be at all constructive for implementing digital systems. The widely recognized problems of interoperability may be traced back to diverse (and buggy) interpretations of vague standards.

Journal

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (HEALTH) – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Nov 3, 2022

Keywords: Open source

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