NHS information quality and integrity: issues arising from primary service provision

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Abstract
Over the past few decades, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) has progressively moved away from a tethered domain thereby becoming diffused into an environment rich with remote and digital information systems components. In such an environment, the population need for healthcare information, at the point-of-care, is a prime factor in managing the NHS efficiently. However, information integrity is sometime derelict. To facilitate such tasks various strategic models have been implemented the latest being primary service provision (PSP), a subset of the application service provision (ASP) business model. It is clear that strategic change approaches in the NHS are always going to involve internet (web services) technology; thus, there is a need to investigate certain pertinent issues regarding healthcare data quality and integrity. In this paper, the authors show how security presents serious challenges to the PSP initiative. It also explains, using the NHS case study, that the quality of health information could be affected by streamlining complex, multistage medical information processes and emphasising on cost/benefit analysis for implementation of a web services model. This paper is based mostly on secondary data from measures being taken, in this publicprivate collaboration initiative, involving the supporting of every aspect of patient care. The overall concern was ensuring strong attention is paid to the aspects of web services that can disengage the NHS's effort to maintain information quality and integrity, and that the traditional goal of the NHS free for all at the point of delivery is kept intact.

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