The Reality Behind Liberating Data Across Care Settings

When patients move between their GP, a hospital appointment, a mental health service, or social care support, most naturally assume their medical information travels with them. It's a reasonable expectation - after all, it's all the NHS. But the truth is that this simply doesn't happen in most cases. Despite decades of digital investment, patient data remains largely trapped in organisational silos, creating fragmented care experiences and potentially dangerous information gaps.

As digital partners working alongside NHS trusts like Leeds Teaching Hospitals, we at Aire Logic see firsthand both the progress being made and the scale of the challenge that remains.

The expectation gap

There's a fundamental disconnect between what many patients assume and what healthcare systems can currently deliver. When someone visits their GP and is subsequently admitted to hospital, they generally expect the emergency department staff can see what medications were recently prescribed, what chronic conditions are being managed, and what allergies have been documented. In reality, this information often isn't immediately available or available at all.

Even within regions that have established shared care records, integration still needs investment. While data might be pushed to council-level systems, different trusts and services rarely pull that information in proactively. The result? Clinicians making decisions without complete information in one consolidated record, patients repeating their medical history multiple times, and increased risk of adverse events like dangerous drug interactions.

Small steps forward

Progress is happening, but it's incremental. Working with Leeds Teaching Hospitals, we're working on implementing the ability to display diagnosis information from regional GP practices into their hospital EPR via GP Connect. This will allow clinicians to see these diagnoses easily at point of care and enable them to be imported into the patient's hospital record.

It sounds straightforward, yet Leeds will be the first trust in the country to implement this specific integration. And once successfully implemented, the next logical step - accessing diagnosis data from Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, where it exists for many Leeds patients - faces its own hurdles. Success depends on other NHS trusts signing up to share their data, highlighting how organisational readiness varies wildly across the system.

The national vision versus reality

The NHS 10 Year Plan promises a single patient record. A vision where a patient's complete medical history is accessible wherever they receive care, whether that's in London or Leeds, in a GP surgery or an emergency department. It's an essential aspiration that would solve critical problems: the GP who prescribes medication would have that information instantly available to hospital staff; the mental health practitioner's treatment plan would be visible to primary care; the patient who moves across the country wouldn't start from scratch.

But we need to be honest about the challenges. Currently, no provider has a solution that can scale reliably and responsibly to true national level. The technical challenges alone are formidable. We're talking about real-time integration across hundreds of trusts and primary care providers, each running different systems, each with unique configurations, each requiring bespoke integration work.

Then there are the organisational challenges. Getting disparate systems within a single trust to talk to each other is difficult enough. Getting all trusts across England to integrate with a national system requires unprecedented coordination, agreement on standards, and alignment of priorities among CIOs who are all managing their own pressing demands.

Building from the ground up

The path forward isn't through one dramatic transformation, but through steady, purposeful building from local to regional to national integration. Each step requires significant engineering effort, and even when complete, the work continues as trusts change systems and technology evolves.

What we need isn't just technical solutions, but collaborative commitment. CIOs must work together to agree on standards and shared priorities. Organisations need to commit to data sharing, even when it means additional work without immediate local benefit. And crucially, government must invest not just in the core national infrastructure, but in the integration work required at every single trust - work that will be unique each time and ongoing as systems evolve.

From our perspective as digital partners, we see the dedication of NHS staff working to make interoperability a reality. Our collaboration with Leeds on their GP Connect implementation is just one step on a much longer journey. But it's an important one, demonstrating that progress is possible when organisations commit to data sharing. Each successful integration creates a template for others, building momentum toward that vision of truly joined-up care.

The gap between patient expectations and healthcare reality remains wide. Closing it won't happen within a single procurement cycle or policy announcement. But by being realistic about the challenges while maintaining commitment to the goal, we can gradually build the connected care systems that patients deserve and assume they already have.