The collection and processing of health information and data plays a vital role in the response to COVID-19, and the pandemic has seen the implementation and rollout of a number of our recommendations and national standards in areas such as GP referrals and contact tracing.
Dr Kevin O’Carroll, HIQA’s Technical Standards Manager, said: “HIQA develops standards and makes recommendations to improve the quality of information shared between health professionals, in turn improving the quality and safety of care for patients and services users. The increased demands on the health service due to COVID-19, and the need for new tools in areas such as contact tracing, have seen the rollout of a number of these recommendations and standards.
“In 2011, we published recommendations and a national standard for referral information. While this standard has been widely adopted by GPs when referring patients to outpatient departments, COVID-19 has seen further rollout of this standard as it has been utilised to allow GPs electronically refer people suspected of having COVID-19 to the testing centres nationwide. In addition, the 2016 National Standard for Demographic Dataset is being adopted and implemented in the IT systems developed to support the contact tracing process.”
Dr Kevin O’Carroll also chairs the SNOMED CT Governance Group, which was established following HIQA’s recommendations to the Minister for Health to implement the SNOMED CT international health information standards in Ireland. Following on from our recommendations, SNOMED CT was adopted as a national standard for Ireland and a National Release Centre was established within the HSE.
During the early stages of the pandemic, the National Release Centre collaborated with SNOMED International and national and international stakeholders to develop and agree a data set for the assessment, testing, contact tracing and management on COVID-19 cases in Ireland, underpinned by SNOMED CT. This dataset was approved by the SNOMED CT Governance Group in April 2020, and progress is being made to implement it in information systems that will support the management of COVID-19 in community and hospital settings. It will improve data quality, and allow for interoperability between information systems, internationally comparable data and for good recording and retrieval data.
Find out more about our work here.