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The IDD collaborative aims to help produce the cross-system data quality and consistency required for care delivery and research, and provides broad stakeholder input to multiple standards governance bodies. The main goals of the group are to:

• reduce design and implementation costs
• develop unified best practice data designs
• recommend national principles, policies, patterns and standards for interoperable care data models, metadata, data rules and reference data

Design and implementation costs can be reduced by recommending the retirement of redundant or conflicting national data standards, and prioritising the adoption of international standards wherever appropriate. For example, giving implementors a forum in which to provide input and ask for improvements to national standards.

There are currently over 70 members including IT suppliers, standards developers, business consultancies, clinicians, LHCRs, researchers and other national bodies such as NHSx, Health Level Seven UK (HL7 UK), Integrating the Health Enterprise UK (IHE UK), NHS Blood and Transplant and NHS Wales. The group discuss a range of topics based on member interests and contributions.

Topics to date have included:

• reviewing data products
• mapping SNOMED CT to NHS Data Dictionary values
• HDR UK’s (Oxford and NHSD-developed) data discovery metadata catalogue
• PRSB/NHSx’s collaborative work on record location service metadata
• the upcoming national terminology service tool
• NHS Digital's work to support metadata-driven processing for collections in our Data Processing Services platform

The group is always welcome to new members who are working or interested in interoperability design, so to find out more and/or register your interest, please contact the collaborative at nhsd.architecture@nhs.net.