Integration done right enhances customer value by enabling seamless data flow, reducing administrative burden, and giving NHS organisations analytical independence. Read this Q&A with Inhealthcare’s product director Jamie Innes to find out more.
Why does integration matter so much in digital health procurement?
“We can integrate with anything.” Every digital health supplier says it in their tender response, but when implementation day arrives, the reality is often very different. Manual workarounds, screen-scraping solutions, and armies of staff transcribing data between systems become the norm rather than the exception.
The integration illusion has become endemic across digital health procurement. Suppliers tick the integration box without explaining the “how”, leaving trusting NHS organisations to discover later that seamless data flow means emailed PDFs requiring manual processing, or robotic process automation that breaks every time a system interface updates. One recent tender feedback we received was telling: “We’ve been let down by our current supplier who promised they could integrate across our entire system but haven’t delivered.”
This matters more than ever because of the scalability tipping point. Manual processes that work adequately for 50 patients on a pilot programme have a nasty habit of failing badly when scaled to 5,000 patients across multiple pathways. Clinical teams find themselves drowning in administrative work, transcription errors creep into patient records, and the promised efficiency gains of digital transformation evaporate into frustration and additional workload.
What does real integration look like in practice?
True integration requires a fundamentally different approach. Rather than one-size-fits-all solutions, healthcare organisations need suppliers who understand that integration is about configuration, not customisation. Every NHS trust has evolved differently, with unique combinations of primary care systems, community platforms, and acute care infrastructure.
A northern NHS community health and care services provider exemplifies what real integration delivers in an England context. We provide Patient Demographic Service lookup across all their services, integrate directly into their SystmOne Community module without requiring internal IT resources, and share data back to primary care through automated pathways. Additionally, we’ve implemented FHIR integration with their regional care record to capture admissions, discharge and transfer data, plus established a data warehouse that allows them to extract information and run analytics in their own business intelligence system.
Scotland demonstrates integration at national scale. Our work there includes integration with national systems to share data across primary care and acute settings, giving visibility across entire health economies. We also integrate with national pathology systems where test results automatically trigger pathway actions; for example, in prostate cancer pathways where laboratory data drives clinical workflow. Additionally, we provide raw data access for evaluation purposes, allowing health boards to compare performance nationally and run their own analytics against consolidated datasets.
These comprehensive integration approaches solve real operational challenges. Clinical staff no longer manually transcribe remote monitoring data between systems. Patient information flows automatically from virtual ward scenarios back to GP practices, ensuring continuity of care without administrative burden. Most importantly, organisations can scale services across multiple pathways and specialties without hitting resource bottlenecks.
What’s the technical difference between good and bad integration?
The technical difference matters enormously. While many suppliers rely on screen-scraping technology, where software mimics a person clicking around on a screen, we use standardised APIs. Screen-scraping breaks when interfaces change unexpectedly, creating hidden failures that only surface when patient data goes missing.
The data warehouse capability particularly sets us apart. NHS organisations with large patient volumes need the ability to run their own reporting and analytics without constantly requesting custom reports from suppliers. Our rheumatology pathway, managing tens of thousands of patients in the West Country, exemplifies this benefit. The hospital can extract data, compare outcomes across different patient cohorts, and support long-term evaluation studies without supplier dependency.
A supplier analysis by a leading NHS innovation organisation validated this broader differentiation. When they moved beyond high-level integration claims to examine specific capabilities, they found significant variations between suppliers. While some offered limited integration functionality, their analysis rated our approach as comprehensive and technically robust.
What should NHS organisations ask when evaluating integration capabilities?
The procurement lesson is clear: due diligence on integration capabilities requires deeper investigation than standard tender responses provide. Organisations should ask suppliers to demonstrate exactly how integration will work within their specific system environment, what happens when local systems update or change, and whether the solution requires internal IT resources for ongoing maintenance.
Don’t let integration promises become implementation nightmares. The difference between suppliers who deliver on integration commitments and those who don’t becomes apparent only after contracts are signed and systems go live. Choose providers with proven track records of solving complex data sharing challenges across the full spectrum of NHS systems and settings.