Design for the exchange. Understand the workflow.

01 / problem

The problem to solve

Transfer of Care meant more than producing an outpatient letter. Clinical information had to be represented in a form another system could interpret, while remaining grounded in the workflows and data of an established Patient Administration System (PAS). A national specification defined the exchange, but the product work still had to connect it to operational reality.

02 / decision

The decision

As Product Owner, I worked at the point where the NHS standard met the product. I treated interoperability as part of the product model: follow the clinical information from the local workflow into the required FHIR resources, rather than consider the interface in isolation.

03 / approach

How I approached it

My working material included the NHS ITK FHIR Outpatient Letter specification, resource-reference guidance, the CareConnect encounter definition and System C outpatient resource mappings. I used these to work through how existing product information related to the exchange model and what that meant for implementation. FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) provided the structure; understanding the clinical workflow gave it meaning.

04 / outcome

What changed

The work connected national interoperability requirements with product-level resource mapping, making the relationship between the outpatient workflow, existing data and the exchange format explicit. It added a standards-based exchange perspective to my PAS product work, alongside patient-journey modelling in Cross Booking and regulated change in CDS v6.3.

05 / What I take forward

What I take forward

Understand the system, not just the feature. A healthcare product decision reaches through clinical workflow, data, configuration, interoperability and operations. In connected vehicles, the same thinking follows a change through vehicle software, cloud services and downstream consumers.

The question I ask:
What else changes if we make this decision?