The announcement at an EMIS Health conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon (3 February 2016) will help the NHS to realise its vision of joined-up care for millions of patients. It follows the company's recent signing of techUK's Interoperability Charter.

From mid-February, the company will begin rolling out an update to its EMIS Web clinical system - used by almost 4,500 GP practices in England and Wales - that allows it to interoperate with any third party supplier who conforms to a published set of open application programme interfaces (APIs). These include the Fast Healthcare Interoperability resources (FHIR) standard and National terminology sets including SNOMED-CT and the NHS Data Dictionary.

In due course, clinicians, whatever IT system they use, with be able to securely share data with colleagues using any of EMIS Health's primary, community, secondary and pharmacy clinical systems.

This milestone puts in place a solid foundation for EMIS Health to rapidly evolve innovative interoperable services. Initially, third party systems will be able to securely obtain real-time primary care patient information, subject to tight information governance controls.

EMIS Group's Chief Medical Officer Dr Shaun O'Hanlon said: "For the last 13 years we have run a highly successful partner programme using our own API to enable integration with third party systems. We are now taking that commitment to a new level - using best practice standards developed by the wider healthcare IT industry as the basis on which we will open up access to our systems for any supplier within the NHS and social care, including NHS Trusts.

"This demonstrates our absolute dedication to freeing up the movement of vital patient information within the NHS to enable more joined-up and informed care. It also supports NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens' determination to make technology an enabler, not a barrier to new ways of organising clinical care."

The unimpeded, secure movement of data across the NHS is a major theme of an independent White Paper presented today by Mark Leaning, Visiting Professor at University College London and an innovator and entrepreneur in healthcare technology.

Related news articles:

• EMIS' Profile

About EMIS Health
EMIS Health is part of EMIS Group plc - the UK leader in connected healthcare software and services.

EMIS Health provides software and services to clinicians working across every major UK healthcare setting, including:

• Primary Care - market leader with 54% share of the UK GP market; its systems hold 40 million cradle to grave patient records;
• Community Children's and Mental Health Care - 9% and growing UK market share;
• Secondary Care - 81% of NHS Acute Trusts use an EMIS Health system; its software holds 30 million patient records in A&E alone;
• Community Pharmacy - the single most used integrated community pharmacy and retail system (36% UK market share);
• Specialist Care - EMIS Health is the leading provider of software and services to support diabetic eye screening (82% English market share) and other ophthalmology and specialist services.

EMIS Health is an innovator in secure data-sharing to join up healthcare. It was the first in the UK to enable community pharmacists to access information from the GP patient record - supporting safer dispensing - and the first to integrate personal health data captured on wearable consumer devices with the GP patient record.