Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has published its trust strategy and clinical strategy for 2025 – 2030, with a focus on a multi-year digital transformation programme set to improve service integration, build capability, realise benefits, ensure effective use of data, and standardise services.
“Our digital mission is to deliver high quality basics, to shift the digital agenda from something that IT do to become an enabler of transformation across the whole organisation, and to deliver data, technology and innovation that improves user experience, enhances care delivery to patients, supports people and process optimisation and enhances value,” the trust states.
As well as getting the basics right and embedding continuous improvement, Black Country Healthcare commits in its trust strategy to develop digital maturity through implementing and realising benefits from solutions including its EPR and patient engagement portal. Integrated teams will be key to fully enable the intended value of digital solutions, it continues, and an emphasis will be placed on providing care “in the right place at the right time”.
A vision is for all services to be supported through care navigation and shared digital records, and opportunities such as the optimisation of clinical workflows and improvements in data-driven decision-making will be explored and maximised. The goal is to fully deploy digital investments across bed management, patient portal, and EPMA, engaging and supporting clinical and operational teams.
Real-time dashboards for service performance and improvement will be developed, according to the trust, with standardised use of systems encouraged to promote “harmonised” services, and additional functionality introduced for electronic referral management and tools to support decision making.
Service users and carers will be involved in the co-design of new services, and supported with tools such as the patient engagement portal, digital therapy tools, ambient voice technology, and digital cognitive behavioural therapy solutions.
For the workforce, there will be “a refreshed and determined organisational wide approach” to digital literacy and skills, whilst working with clinical and corporate teams will help identify challenges preventing workforce optimisation and solutions to overcome them.
“A key challenge is using our entire workforce in the most effective way,” Black Country Healthcare notes. “One of the ways we can be efficient in our delivery is to invest in digital workforce systems to aid decision making and resource management such as rostering and job planning. Our focus will be to identify and improve our digital tools and capability so that we can understand and optimise our workforce’s full potential.”
When it comes to benefits realisation, Black Country Healthcare commits to: “Adding further rigour to our benefits realisation process – establish a benefits realisation framework and create clinical informatics-led change and adoption to convert project delivery into business change and benefits release.” Some of the ways success will be measured cover improved inpatient experience scores and waiting times, better staff survey results, reduced inpatient occupied bed days, increased community mental health scores, and more people being supported closer to home.
Also of note is the trust’s clinical strategy for 2025 – 2030, which places digital, data, and technology as a “key enabler”, looking to implement digital tools such as EHR, EPMA and clinical decision support systems to reduce clinical errors and improve patient safety. Remote consultations, telehealth services and mobile apps will aim to improve patient access to care, and tech including AI will help automate administrative tasks and streamline clinical workflows.
Analytics and AI capabilities, along with tools like the Management and Supervision Tool (MaST) will play a role in supporting evidence-based clinical decisions, increasing data sharing across settings, and supporting personalised care. Patients will be empowered to manage their own health through access to medical records and communication with health providers via the patient engagement portal.
Areas identified as requiring further embedding are cyber security and data governance, digitally enabled care pathways in mental health, interoperability and data integration for real-time access to accurate patient information, and digital literacy to support staff in delivering safe and effective care in “increasingly technology-enabled environments”.
In year one, aims include implementing clinical MDT standards and dashboards in all settings, whilst in year two the focuses are on developing an online offer for family and carer support interventions and undertaking an audit of digital literacy. Year three will look to post-stabilisation of the trust’s EHR and the use of data to evaluate the impact of digital plans.
Wider trend: NHS Trust digital transformation
Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust has highlighted progress around digital systems, AI, ambient voice and virtual care, and an upcoming upgrade to the AlderC@re EPR system to deliver additional functionality and keep pace with developments in AI and patient tools. The business case to upgrade the AlderC@re EPR system from Meditech Expanse version 2.1 to 2.2 was approved by the Finance Transformation and Performance Committee in November 2025, the trust shares, offering benefits and added functionality across nursing, oncology, labs, and critical care.
The Our Dorset digital strategy to 2030 has been published, sharing the aim to create a “seamless, integrated digital ecosystem that empowers staff, improves patient experiences, and leverages emerging technologies like AI to deliver equitable, efficient, and person-centred care across all health and social care settings”. The strategy is centred around four strategic themes: efficiency and productivity; safe use; digitise, connect, transform; and research and innovation.
Isle of Wight NHS Trust and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust have published their latest Digital Strategy, setting out a roadmap to 2031, with year one focuses including OneEPR design, infrastructure design and virtual hospital; before moving into AI integration, EPR optimisation, data platform deployment, AI-driven pathways, and “smart” hospital operations. By 2030, the trusts hope to have 80 percent of patients using the patient portal, to have reduced medication errors by 50 percent with EPR, to release 100,000 hours per year in time saved through automation, to reduce outpatient DNAs by 30 percent, and to have reduced admission for long-term conditions by 15 percent.
