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Reimagining EPRs for 2030

September 23, 2025 | Clinical Workflow, Miya Precision, Modern Modular EPR

By Tracy McClelland, Chief Clinical Information Officer Alcidion

As a Chief Clinical Information Officer working with NHS partners every day, I see the same pattern across Trusts and Integrated Care Systems: digital leaders are being asked to do more with less, to innovate without disrupting care, and to connect services in ways their current systems were never designed to do.

This piece is both a reflection on the NHS’s evolving digital strategy and a personal perspective. Moving into my new role at Alcidion has prompted me to step back and consider where the NHS truly needs to go next. Having been part of frontline care, clinical leadership, and now working with suppliers, I’m convinced that the shift from procurement-led thinking to platform-based strategy is the pivot point the health service cannot afford to miss. It’s not about buying bigger systems; it’s about building ecosystems that adapt with patients, staff, and policy.

We are living through the second wave of NHS digital investment. The first wave – getting EPRs in place – was necessary, but it left many organisations tied into rigid, monolithic models. The second wave must be different: it must create platforms that are modular, standards-based, and capable of evolving with clinical practice. Platforms unlock agility, resilience, and clinical value in a way single-vendor, single-stack systems cannot. They allow the NHS to avoid repeating the mistakes of past procurements, locking in high cost, low agility, and limited patient impact and instead build sustainable digital ecosystems that will serve patients and staff through to 2030 and beyond.

Why platforms matter for the NHS in 2030

The NHS faces unprecedented pressures: workforce shortages, growing demand, and the shift towards community and preventative care. As my colleague Dr Paul Deffley’s recent article on realising the NHS 10 Year Plan emphasises, this isn’t about adding more tools, but creating foundational digital infrastructure that enables diverse capabilities to be built, integrated and evolved. A platform approach is not just a technical preference – it is a strategic response to these realities.

  1. Agility in the face of change
    • New models of care such as virtual wards, hospital at home and anticipatory care are expanding rapidly. A platform lets organisations integrate new solutions without tearing down existing infrastructure.
  2. Interoperability as the default
    • Platforms enforce open standards such as FHIR, SNOMED CT, openEHR so that data is not just collected but usable across settings.
  3. Clinical and operational resilience
  4. Financial sustainability
    • Platforms shift the investment model from one-off mega deals to incremental, modular improvements, protecting NHS budgets from vendor lock-in.

In short: platforms create the conditions for continuous improvement rather than episodic transformation.

What platforms mean for doctors

For doctors, the monolithic EPR is too often a source of frustration; slow logins, fragmented views, multiple clicks to reach information. A platform approach can change this by:

  • Providing longitudinal patient records that draw from multiple systems into one clinician-facing view, a principle set out in the Wachter Review.
  • Enabling decision support at the point of care, surfacing risks, alerts, and best-practice pathways based on real-time data – addressing issues raised in GIRFT and NCEPOD reports on the impact of poor information flow.
  • Allowing innovation to flow quickly – for example, integrating AI image analysis, prescribing safety tools, or specialty-specific modules without waiting years for the core EPR vendor to release functionality.

In practice, this means less time hunting for information and more time focused on patient care.

What platforms mean for nurses

Nurses make up the largest proportion of the NHS workforce, yet digital tools are often least optimised for their workflows. A platform approach:

  • Supports mobile-first bedside documentation, reducing duplication and freeing nurses to spend more time with patients, as called for in the RCN’s Improving Digital Literacy report.
  • Enables handover, escalation, and task management tools to plug directly into core workflows—critical for patient safety.
  • Connects observations, NEWS2, and care planning into a real-time patient status dashboard, building on the NEWS2 national implementation guidance.

For nurses, platforms don’t just digitise old processes—they redesign work to be safer, faster, and more team-based.

Patient engagement and the digital front door

By 2030, the NHS App will be the primary interface for most citizens. But the App is only as good as the data and services it connects to. A platform approach:

  • Provides open APIs that allow Trust systems to integrate seamlessly with national services.
  • Enables patient-generated data (symptoms, PROMs, wearables) to flow safely into clinical systems, reflecting the NHS Transformation Directorate’s work on remote monitoring pilots.
  • Allows two-way engagement: not just delivering appointments and results, but supporting shared decision-making, digital consent, and self-management pathways, as emphasised by The King’s Fund.

Patients don’t care which EPR or module their Trust runs. They care about connected experiences. Platforms are the only way to deliver this consistently.

Left shift: supporting care closer to home

Every ICS is under pressure to shift care “left”, away from hospital beds and into community, primary, and preventative care. Monolithic EPRs, tied to hospital boundaries, are a poor fit for this challenge. Platforms, by contrast, are built to span care settings. They:

  • Allow shared care records to integrate with acute data flows, in line with the Shared Care Records programme.
  • Support virtual wards and remote monitoring, providing clinicians with real-time data without relying on inpatient documentation – core to the NHS Confederation’s work on virtual wards and hospital at home.
  • Enable population health intelligence, drawing data from across the ICS to target interventions before patients deteriorate, as envisaged in Data Saves Lives.

This is how platforms support the transition from treatment to prevention – a cornerstone of the NHS Long Term Plan.

The role of suppliers in cultural change

Vendors cannot just deliver technology. We must help drive cultural and clinical change. That means:

  • Providing standards based, clinically led core content and workflows
  • Embedding co-design with clinicians and patients into every implementation, echoing lessons from the Ipsos report on national digital programmes.
  • Supporting clinical leadership structures within trusts, recognising that digital maturity is as much about people as systems.
  • Ensuring that our platforms evolve with the NHS, rather than the NHS being forced to adapt to vendor roadmaps.

The cultural shift is from technology as a product to platform as a partnership.

Where Alcidion fits

At Alcidion, our philosophy is platform-first. We don’t ask trusts to rip and replace; we help them build modular ecosystems around existing investments.

  • Miya Precision provides the orchestration layer: integrating data, workflows, and intelligence across disparate systems.
  • Miya Flow and Operations Centre offer individual patient through to ICS-level visibility and patient flow optimisation.
  • Smartpage ensures safe communication, escalation, and team coordination.
  • Miya Observations and clinical dashboards provide frontline staff with actionable, real-time insights.

The NHS cannot afford another decade of monolithic EPR strategies. By 2030, the health service must operate on platform principles: modular, open, resilient, and patient-centred.

For doctors, platforms mean better data at the point of care. For nurses, safer and smarter workflows. For patients, connected experiences and genuine engagement. For ICSs, the ability to shift care into the community and build resilience into the system.

As a supplier CCIO, I see my role not just as delivering technology, but as helping to co-create a digital platform for the NHS – one that enables agility, empowers clinicians, engages patients, and supports the left shift we all know is necessary.

Additional Reading

For those who would like to explore the policy and evidence base behind this discussion, here are key sources: