David Hancock elected vendor co-chair at INTEROPen

David Hancock

Reporter: Stuart Littleford

The healthcare executive advisor at founder-member InterSystems wants the standards organisation to persist with collaboration and focus on adoption

David Hancock has been elected to the new role of vendor co-chair at INTEROPen, the collaborative set up to accelerate the development of open standards to enable health and care systems to interoperate with each other.

The election of Hancock, healthcare executive advisor at InterSystems, comes at a critical time for INTEROPen, which has grown rapidly from eight founders three years ago to around 350 members today.

The organisation has played an important role in shifting the attention of policy makers and informaticians from developing programmes and deploying systems to making sure that they can share information with each other.

INTEROpen is now looking at evolving its membership model to support a stronger focus on the take-up and use of standards to support patient care and service transformation. “It is not enough to be able to define standards,” Hancock says. “But to move to the next level, the organisation needs to become vendor-driven, because the best way to make standards stick is to get them incorporated into vendor products. That is why INTEROPen made the decision to create a vendor co-chair and, for me, the role is all about driving adoption.”

Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare for InterSystems said: “We are proud of our continued association with this important collaboration and we are delighted that David Hancock will be taking it forward for the benefit of the NHS, the health tech community, and everybody who believes in effective, integrated care as the foundation for a system fit for the 21st century.”

Hancock has more than twenty years’ experience of working in the health tech industry, having held senior roles at Oracle Corporation and Orion Health before moving to InterSystems in July 2015. He has been a member of the techUK health and social care council for two years and represented the trade body on the INTEROPen board until it decided to create the vendor co-chair position.