I’m pleased that my company Tactix4 has won two awards from The Information Sharing Challenge Fund, a Department of Health initiative funding ideas that change the way information is used and shared between different organisations.
Two NHS Trusts bid with Tactix4 demonstrating that our ideas showed value for money that could easily be adopted by other NHS organisations as part of the NHS Interoperability Toolkit (ITK).
Rebecca Todd at EHI reports that Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust had three successful bids worth more than £90,000 in total. Deputy IT director Clive Stringer said his team was very pleased to have been awarded the funding: “Without the funding from the challenge fund it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to get these projects agreed, because they benefit the whole health community rather than deliver specific cash releasing benefits to King’s alone” he told E-Health Insider.
One of the successful bids is to gain ITK compliance for a new open source integration engine that the trust is developing with Tactix4. The trust started building the integration engine about three months ago and has recently gone live with the first ten of 50 interfaces.
“Because all the work is based on open source and will be published free of charge, other trusts using the same integration engine will be able to benefit from the project upon completion.”
Tactix4 are working with Kings on implementing ITK compliant components for CDA to the opensource FuseESB platform.
“The CDA components and the transformations we produce will be opensource on github when completed. We hope that other healthcare organisations will want to join the development community and extend the engine to support more ITK components and enabling source and destination systems to communicate with ITK services.”
Although Tactix4 and Kings are are not ‘coding in the open’ at this time all the components will be released shortly after we’ve completed the approval process.
For those seeking more information before we release, do email Rob Dyke at Tactix4.