Data standards
We know that when professionals have access to the right information about the people they’re working with, they can make better decisions about people’s care and support. This can lead to better outcomes.
But giving professionals access to your information isn’t as straightforward as it might sound. Your information is held as data on many different computer systems, and these systems may not be connected to each other.
Even if we did connect these computers together, they wouldn’t be able to exchange data with each other because they don’t speak a common language.
This is why we need data standards. If the data that holds information about us could be described in the same way, then computer systems could understand each other and pass data from one system to another.
A data standard is a particular way of describing a piece of data. When we talk about data, it might help to think of it as a piece of information.
Example: What’s the date?
We can write a date in several different ways:
- 1 June 2028
- 30-Nov-12
- 07/04/2025
Most of us would see these and quickly recognise them as a date.
In the UK, we’d read the last of those dates as being 7 April. In the USA, they’d read it as 4 July, because the month comes first in American dates.
This shows how easy it can be to confuse the meaning behind a piece of data if we don’t have a standard way of describing it.
What if we all described dates as a four-number year followed by a three-letter month and a two-number day?
The date above would be written as:
2025-APR-07
If everyone uses the same format then it makes sense to the machines (and people) that need to share this information with each other.
In this case, we’ve also made sure that it’s difficult to get the date elements mixed up, because we’ve formatted them differently. The month now uses a three-letter format, rather than a number. We’ve created a standard way of describing a date, or a data standard.
Not all data standards are as straightforward as this, but it helps show the kind of alignment that would need to happen across health and social care data.
What is data interoperability?
Data interoperability is a way of describing data that can be shared between computer systems.
To become interoperable, or capable of sharing data, we need to teach the computers to speak the same language.
We call this language a data interoperability framework and it’s this language that contains all of the data standards.
Which framework are we using in Wales?
In Wales, we’ve decided to use a framework called Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR (pronounced like the word ‘fire’). This is the language that health data speaks, which already holds thousands of data standards that relate to a person’s healthcare.
It doesn’t yet contain much information about social care. If we want to use this language to share both health and care data, we need to teach it about social care data.
But before we do this, we need to make sure we’re confident that people mean the same thing when they talk about the data. We need to agree what the standard is for each piece of social care data we add to this language.
This can be difficult, because we don’t always agree.
Think about the date example we gave above. Most of us will have a preferred way of writing a date and most of us would want that to be the standard. But sometimes we need to compromise and choose a different format, or think about whether another way is better or is easier to reach consensus on.
We need to work together to agree what these data standards are, as well as working with the people who build the systems, so that they’re able to speak the improved language that now contains information about social care data.
Read a blog about FHIR by Owen Davies, our Data and Intelligence Manager.
How long does it take to develop data standards?
It can take a long time to develop data standards, but the good news is that we don’t need to develop data standards for all of our information. We can start with the bits of information that are the most important to share between the people who work to deliver our health and care.
We can also add new data standards to the FHIR framework over time. We don’t have to develop them all at once. This means we improve the language as time goes by and are able to share more and more data.
When will this happen?
We’re working to develop the data standards for social care right now.
The computer systems that will be able to understand the FHIR language are also beginning to be implemented.
Most of the time, you won’t see your data being shared as this happens automatically, but it should mean that you get a much better experience of the health and social care system.
It means you won’t have to repeat your story over and over again. It also means your health or social care professional will be better informed and able to make better decisions with you about your health and care.
Better data, means better decisions and better care and support.
Find out more
Email us at data@socialcare.wales if you'd like to know more about our work on data standards.