TRE /ARCHIE Final report
Overarching technology principles
Work prior to the CHC project in the North East, at Newcastle University Business School, had indicated that, in a multivendor community, hub based front-line record sharing using commonly available document structures, such as pdf, HL7 CDA, and OpenEHR, would offer a useful start. Indexing using IHE XDS profiles was already successfully undertaken in the LPRES project in North West Coast, using open-source based middleware supported by Tiani-Spirit. In addition, an early piece of work under CHC-NENC was carried out by GE Healthcare Finnamore to collect stakeholder input as to what a shared record and analytic platform for the region might look like. With these issues in mind, the intention was to create an open-standards based platform or hub for federated data analysis and information sharing across the NENC region.
Medical Information Gateway (MIG)
The first stage of the hub development was the decision to make the Medical Information Gateway (MIG) accessible to front line care at local hospitals. This allowed clinicians, with consent from patients, to look at their GP record in order to help their immediate care needs. This one-way realtime pull of individual’s GP data is in constant use across the region. This was seen as the first step in building a truly connected NENC, and fed into the design of ARCHIE.
The ARCHIE sub-project
With the early success of the MIG, and based on background research (above), a high-level picture of what the infrastructure needed to look like was then developed. It consisted of two major components joined together: A Trusted Research Environment (TRE) and a Health Information Exchange (HIE).