Structured Data Is Dead. Long Live Structured Data
There is no shortage of discussion about the opportunities that AI may create within health and social care. Modern language models appear increasingly capable of interpreting narrative, answering questions and identifying relationships across both structured and unstructured information. In a domain where information is often recorded and understood as a mixture of records, observations and stories, it is tempting to conclude that the way data is represented no longer matters. In other words, perhaps structured data is dead.
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Structured Data Is Dead. Long Live Structured Data
There is no shortage of discussion about the opportunities that AI may create within health and social care. Modern language models appear increasingly capable of interpreting narrative, answering questions and identifying relationships across both structured and unstructured information. In a domain where information is often recorded and understood as a mixture of records, observations and stories, it is tempting to conclude that the way data is represented no longer matters. In other words, perhaps structured data is dead.Reflections on the Social Care Interoperability Platform Hack Day
The Social Care Interoperability Platform (SCIP) Hack Day brought together six digital social care record providers to test the practical realities of interoperability using a prototype federated integration platform deployed specifically to support the event. Working from a shared data model (MODS) and transforming to and from FHIR, teams were able to publish, retrieve, and consume synthetic data end-to-end within a single day.A federated approach to joining up data
Recent work testing federated data sharing in an adult social care context has demonstrated how established NHS interoperability principles can be extended beyond traditional healthcare settings. Using a derivative of an existing NHS-owned platform and working collaboratively with digital social care record suppliers, this approach has shown how data can be discovered, accessed, and combined across organisational boundaries in practice. While joining up data across health and care remains challenging due to fragmentation and differing ownership, data federation offers a scalable alternative to centralised repositories and point‑to‑point integrations, enabling data to remain with providers while being accessed through a unified interface as if it were a single dataset.FHIR StructureMaps: Enabling Bi‑Directional Data Transformation
Healthcare interoperability often sounds straightforward—move data reliably between systems—but real‑world integration is far more complex, with differing models, semantics, and concepts. In a recent project, we faced this challenge in a sector with no existing interoperability standard, relying instead on a widely adopted operational dataset as our domain model. To bridge the gap with FHIR, we used StructureMaps and the $transform operation, enabling clean, scalable, bi‑directional mapping. This allowed us to deliver a robust transformation layer without building yet another bespoke engine.SHCR Summit 2025: Patient mediated IPS sharing using a digital assistant
The recent Shared Care Record Summit Learnathon explored how International Patient Summaries (IPS) can be generated, shared, and consumed using FHIR standards and secure data sharing protocols. Our team showcased how a FHIR International Patient Summary (IPS) can be assembled on-the-fly from federated data using the NHS National Record Locator (NRL) and demonstrated patient-mediated sharing powered by an AI digital assistant.Announcements
We’re proud to introduce Symmetry, a new way to transform care planning into a strategic asset. 👉 Read more...
