Less Boundary Spanners and Individual Innovators, and More Architecture?

I have worked in the area of data sharing for almost a decade, and we have a highly successful spin-out company— Symphonic — and patents to show for it . But the barriers to sharing and in getting different elements of health and social care to work together are as difficult as they have ever been.

With Estonia, there has been true leadership from those who understand in how to bring systems together, along with integrating strong cybersecurity and citizen trust levels. But Scotland has struggled to move away from its silo’ed world of public sector data, and where the only real sign of change is a common internal identifier and in the creation of internal data lakes. There is no grand Estonian X-Road architecture, or Finnish service integration, or large-scale citizen involvement.

And so I came across a research paper published by Pearson et al [here] and which outlined the progress on health and social care integration in Scotland:

And there was a phrase that really stood out …

‘boundary spanners’