The Health Informatics Unit (HIU) was established in 2002 and is housed within the Clinical Standards Department of the Royal College of Physicians in London.
Aims of the HIU
The main aims of the HIU are:
- to develop standards for recording and communicating information about patients
- to apply these standards to operational records to improve the validity and utility of patient data
- to structure the records so that the information can be incorporated into electronic records, shared with other healthcare providers and analysed with confidence
The HIU believes in the development of a patient-focused, longitudinal, generic electronic record that can be customised to the wide variety of contexts in which patients are seen.
The Case and the Vision for Patient-Focused Records
Key Activities
The main areas of our recent focus include:
Project with Audit Commission - August 2009
In 2008, the Audit Commission’s Payment by Results (PbR) data assurance framework found significant levels of error at both the clinical coding and the Healthcare Resource Group (HRG) levels. The most common factor found to contribute to errors was the quality of the source documentation from which the coding data were extracted. The Audit Commission invited the HIU to collaborate in a joint project to explore the impact on clinical coding of introducing the new record keeping standards.
Record Keeping Standards - October 2008
Launch of Medical Record Keeping Standards for hospital admission records, handover and discharge documentation.
Clinicians Guide to Hospital Activity Data - December 2007
Work on the collection and clinical validation of routine data. A clinicians guide has been published.