Dedalus extends CSIRO partnership to help healthcare organisations manage data

The technology enables healthcare organisations to speak the same clinical language by mapping and browsing different code sets and creating standard based outputs.

Dedalus and CSIRO are successfully delivering a terminology service, as a fully managed national and federated solution in the UK, with customers including NHS England, NHS Scotland and OneLondon.

The extended partnership agreement means organisations and healthcare economies globally can benefit from the same partnership and technology. The first customer beyond the UK was in the Netherlands. The managed services offering by Dedalus includes cloud hosting, support, consultancy and training, providing customers with a fully managed, highly reliable Software as a Service.

Healthcare data is often locked in siloed systems within local organisations and cannot easily be shared. One of the key barriers to sharing data is differences in the codes and terminologies used by organisations to record key clinical data about their patients.

With the set of world leading tools from CSIRO we now enable and facilitate healthcare organisations to speak the same clinical language by mapping and browsing different code sets and creating standard based outputs. The terminology server is FHIR® conformant, which ensures data is captured, shared and analysed across the health and care system in a standardised way.

“We are seeing organisations and countries recognise the need to standardise the language of healthcare,” said Andrea Fiumicelli, CEO of Dedalus Group.

“Our customers also tell us that they need solutions that help them rapidly and efficiently adopt standards because underlying systems are all at different stages of standards implementation. The partnership with CSIRO, demonstrates how together we can help clinicians, researchers and healthcare communities unlock the value of healthcare data and move towards more integrated healthcare systems,” he said.

The need to exchange health and care data safely and consistently across systems, departments, organisations and healthcare economies has never been greater. In a mixed landscape of legacy systems and new solutions and international, national, regional and local codes, the terminology server solution makes the adoption of standards simpler, easier and more cost effective.

The successful partnership between Dedalus and CSIRO provides a complementary blend of Dedalus’ experience delivering business critical healthcare solutions and the expertise and knowledge that CSIRO have invested in health data interoperability research and development.

“Our research was designed to improve healthcare – and it’s fulfilling to see that happen. CSIRO’s clinical terminology solutions such as Ontoserver support the expansion of health interoperability globally – which will help patients and clinicians use data to improve their health. Working with industry partners like Dedalus is pivotal to ensuring our research achieves its full potential in the health space,” said David Hansen, Research Director of CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre.

One of the key features of the terminology server is its ability to translate items into a common “language of health” when professionals describe something using different terms. This enables disparate descriptions of the same symptom, for instance, to be matched so that all the organisations and software involved in a patient’s journey can “talk” to each other and reconcile patient data more effectively.

The terminology solution offers benefit across various fields. Clinicians can code in the same language, making it easier to input data and share information. Researchers can use the improved coded data to facilitate better research. Organisations from across the system can rapidly receive national code sets and updates, such as SNOMED CT, which helps them stay up-to-date and compliant with the latest standards. Finally, through a single API, organisations can innovate and create new apps without the need to maintain large code sets, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Ontoserver is free to licence within Australia. To date more than 100 organisations in Australia have accessed the Ontoserver licence via the National Clinical Terminology Service. Find out more.