Child Health Interoperability (CHI) implementation guide for child health information services

NHS England, NHSx and NHS Digital are all working together to simplify exchange of child health information in support of the Healthy Child Programme. A strategy document outlining the approach is available: Healthy Children: Transforming Child Health Information

The vision of this strategy is encapsulated in two aims:

• knowing where every child is and how healthy they are
• appropriate access to information for all involved in the care of children 

A national Digital Child Health (DCH) programme has been created to support the delivery of the Healthy Child Programme –the universal preventative pathway for all children in England through better use of information and technology. 

This document tells you how you can take advantage of the changes being introduced by the Digital Child Health programme.

The programme has three main objectives:

• Provide efficiency savings for Child Health Information Services (CHIS): use new infrastructure and messaging to replace paper notifications and re-keying of information in regional CHIS offices, which in some less automated services could save between 25% and 50% of administrative effort. This could potentially release resource for improved failsafing of the Healthy Child Programme, including transition to a digital redbook service.

• Provide improvements in direct care for services delivering the Healthy Child Programme: use new infrastructure and messaging to improve the efficiency of information exchange between health visiting, primary care and school nursing, leading to more timely and comprehensive information on a child’s health available to professionals, potentially leading to better decision support and improved outcomes for children.
• Provide a foundation for electronic personal child health record: use new infrastructure and messaging to provide a foundation for an electronic personal child health record service to be offered to parents in place of paper redbooks.

The new infrastructure being provided to help with information exchange is called an Events Management Service (EMS) and is available both locally (LEMS) and nationally (NEMS). It simply provides a way that messages can be exchanged and the supplier of the IT system you use to hold a child’s health record connects to this, on your behalf, so that information (messages) can flow between your service, CHIS and primary care.

Sometimes your service will send information for others to see and use, sometimes they will send you information.