We’re delighted to present our finalists for the category of “Best use of digital and data for NHS trusts”:
Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trust: CDS recovery through FDP: A trust-led, multi-partner transformation and platform to excel
Overview: Faced with legacy data challenges, the trust led a first-of-type collaboration with NHSE and FDP to restore national submissions, strengthen planning capabilities, and modernise its data platform. This initiative redefined data resilience, enabled future standards adoption, and now serves as a model across the NHS.
What happened? In April 2024, the trust identified legacy challenges within its Data Warehouse. By June 2025, it took a bold decision to temporarily pause national submissions, allowing teams to focus on designing a robust, scalable, and standards-compliant data solution. In December, the trust proactively engaged with NHS England and the national FDP team to explore opportunities for strategic support. What followed was an exceptional cross-organisational effort that brought together close technical collaboration between FDP developers and the trust’s internal Data Warehouse team, with support from SMEs across key areas of the organisation. Rigorous testing cycles underpinned the delivery. The trust maintained a consistently transparent and inclusive approach. This culture of collaboration, trust, and responsiveness supported the successful on-time delivery of the solution, meeting the critical 2024/25 year-end refresh. The trust successfully reinstated its national data submissions, including CDS and SLAM, allowing it to meet statutory reporting requirements and avoid financial and compliance risks.
The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn NHS Foundation Trust: Implementation of OPTICA to improve discharge planning through collaboration
Overview: The Queen Elizabeth Hospital implemented a cloud-based discharge planning application – OPTICA (Optimised Patient Tracking and Intelligent Choices Application), enabling teams in separate organisations to collaborate on live patient data to streamline complex discharge planning, supporting a reduction in length of stay for patients.
What happened? OPTICA holds data about the patient’s admission and demographics, fed from QEH’s patient records system. Discharge planning teams from the acute, community and council add specific discharge planning tasks to patient records. Users can view and amend any tasks associated with a patient within their locality. OPTICA replaces a single spreadsheet, and its in-house reporting function provides access to a wide range of data at the click of a button. Since its implementation, OPTICA has supported and enabled several improvements. These include the successful implementation of a new Discharge2Assess model, reliant on timely access to discharge tracking information, which has created a reduction in length of stay of up to six days for pathway one patients. An integrated team of Trusted Assessors, comprising colleagues from both the acute and community NHS Trusts, has provided further reductions in length of stay. It supported an accelerated discharge programme for patients on a P2 pathway, ensuring that patients are discharged in a more timely way. More comprehensive datasets and data analysis are available, providing valuable information to support flow. Two other acute hospitals in Norfolk and Waveney have now also gone live with OPTICA.
Block: Connecting care: Modernising network infrastructure with Block
Overview: Block partners with Trusts (including North Bristol, University Hospitals of North Midlands, Mid and South Essex) to modernise network infrastructure. This has supported EPR roll out, achieved long-term cost savings, improved data security, and enhanced patient care.
What happened? Block’s FutureNow Networks solution designs, builds, and optimises network architecture. Block’s engineers developed Axiom, which consolidates network performance data to provide real-time insights and uses automation to quickly flag risks. Axiom has helped clients reduce network recovery time by 80 percent, reduce cost to serve by 50 percent, and reduce tickets by 50 percent. Block’s networks are built with failover capabilities and automated recovery to minimise outages. Automated monitoring and proactive issue resolution ensure problems are detected and resolved before they impact patient care. Continuous updates drive reliability, performance, and security. Agile Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps, and automation enable rapid scaling. At North Bristol NHS Trust, over a five-year period, Block implemented a Cisco Software Defined network across 24,000 endpoints, fully replacing outdated hardware. The project has also introduced advanced micro-segmentation to contain potential breaches as well as robust network authentication systems to block unauthorised devices. Meanwhile, enhanced endpoint visibility has enabled the digital team to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities that would have previously affected patient care.
Solventum: Harnessing clinical coding excellence to power patient care, insightful data and financial sustainability at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
Overview: Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust transformed its clinical coding using the Solventum – Intelligent Analytics Suite. Teams are supported to identify missed opportunities in real time, ensuring accurate, policy-aligned reimbursement, with approximately £1.5 million in appropriate reimbursement opportunities identified in 2024/25.
What happened? The trust implemented Solventum’s data quality analytics suite, including its Medical History Assurance (MHA), which is designed to facilitate the accurate recording of case mix by prompting coders to review relevant medical history based on previous patient records. Integrated directly into the coding workflow, it helps coders identify historical comorbidities that may impact the HRG, reduce omissions of critical diagnoses during coding, and assure accurate and complete clinical representation of the patient episode. The trust has achieved significant improvements in both coding accuracy and financial outcomes, identifying additional appropriate annual reimbursement of £1.5 million, enhancing depth of clinical coding, capturing complete comorbidities and complications, and achieving average coding completeness of 95 percent within prescribed deadlines. WAH has established a robust quality improvement cycle where regular education sessions between clinicians and clinical coders build mutual understanding, consultants from key specialties now attend monthly coding review meetings, and monthly specialty-specific coding accuracy reports highlight improvement opportunities.
