NHS Trust Region Series: South East
Welcome to our region series for 2026, where we take a deep dive into what’s happening with digital and data across the South East region. We’ll explore pilots and innovations, strategies, case studies, and insights from the sector.
Digital strategy, digital plans and priorities
Isle of Wight NHS Trust and Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust
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. Looking to improving and sharing information, IWT and PHU commit to developing a data platform bringing together information from both trusts and the wider ICS, with the aim of creating a “single, trusted view” of data, informing strategic planning, and unlocking the potential of AI-driven insights in shaping more personalised services. Investment in automation, AI, and advanced analytics will support population health management and service redesign, and the trusts’ data and analytics teams will continue to work on maximising the value of data assets and delivering “actionable intelligence” for decision-making.
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust shared updates on its Frontline Digitisation programme, including key work on patient records, EMIS rollout, and EPMA. “Following the cyber attack in 2022, the trust made the decision to move to Rio and EMIS, initially with basic system configurations but with an agreed programme of optimisation to follow,” the trust notes. The rollout of EPMA is underway, with implementation in mental health inpatient wards to be followed by outpatients and community inpatients. A programme of system interoperability via the trust’s integration engine and shared care records is planned to ensure the right data is available to clinical teams, and network improvements, devices, and infrastructure are all listed as “critical enablers” to delivery. Oxford Health also looks to achieve level four digital maturity on the What Good Looks Like framework, and to finish delivering its current digital strategy which is due to be refreshed in 2026.
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
A new trust strategy from University Hospitals Sussex has outlined “ambitious plans to deliver big changes” over the next five years, including a £100 million digital transformation, £350 million in investment in clinical services, better facilities and systems, and increased use of robotic surgery and AI. Roxanne Smith, the trust’s chief strategy officer, called the strategy a “comprehensive response to a period of significant change, driven both by new NHS priorities and the evolving needs of our aging population”. Roxanne added: “Excellent Care Everywhere is the way we will think, organise, and work differently to unlock the immense potential of our 17,800 staff, seven hospitals, and our budget of more than £1.5 billion. We will be investing heavily in new infrastructure, digital platforms, state-of-the-art equipment, and comprehensive staff training to ensure we provide the excellent and consistent care that every patient deserves.”
University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust
University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust has shared successes from 2024-25 and next steps for digital in medicines management, focusing on digital system upgrades and improving electronic prescribing uptake. UHS has taken on an EPMA lead role for the OneEPR programme, working to assess process flows for medicines across four acute trusts, and to identify “convergence and transformation opportunities” prior to OneEPR system deployment.
Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust
Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust has outlined plans to become a “nationally-recognised centre of excellence for clinical research”, utilising AI and data as part of its innovation strategy. By 2030, the trust plans to ensure that it is delivering “high-impact, patient-focused research” to inform the best possible future care for patients, focusing on areas such as genomics, robotic surgery, and rare diseases, and integrating research governance processes and infrastructure with the University of Surrey. The trust sets the objective of harnessing digital innovation, AI, and health data to accelerate discovery, evaluation, and implementation of research findings into routine care. By 2030, it looks to “actively contribute” to the integration of tech and AI in research programmes, to enhance digital literacy and capability within research teams, and to use data analytics and AI to inform study design and delivery.
Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust
Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust has explored how the organisation aligns with the NHS 10 year plan, to explore opportunities and make strategic recommendations. The trust highlights opportunities to increase commercial and innovation skillsets and to review strategic direction following NHS operating model changes. In particular, the trust notes future opportunities in genomics and prevention, digital solutions such as Ambient AI, the NHS App as an SMS alternative, and the single patient record. The board also shared digital updates including continued progress on the development of a digital roadmap, and efforts toward EPR convergence and EDM replacement. DGT’s 2030 aspirations are to reach 95 percent of staff reporting digital systems are supporting their delivery of outstanding care, 95 percent of staff having the digital skills to innovate and provide outstanding care “now and in the years to come”, and a 70 percent increase in the utilisation of the trust’s patient portal. Risks to the trust’s implementation of the 10 year plan reportedly include gaps in digital readiness around digital skills, infrastructure, and integration. In mitigating this, DGT’s approach will focus on the delivery of its digital roadmap and the digital enabler priorities set out within its own strategy.
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Acute Provider Collaborative
Hampshire and Isle of Wight Acute Provider Collaborative has outlined progress and next steps toward the provision of a single EPR across the ICB’s four acute trusts. Progress to date includes process mapping and benefits, the APC shares, and noting procurement support has also been secured.
Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust
Strategic milestones to 2030 for data, AI, EPR, and remote care at Frimley Health NHS Foundation Trust have set the trajectory for the trust’s digital journey over the next four years. Focuses include moving care closer to home, embracing digital transformation and data-driven decisions, promoting staff digital literacy, upgrading digital systems and smart technologies, optimising EPR, and embedding research and innovation. On modernising infrastructure, the trust sets goals of having a range of clinical and operational dashboards in place, enhancing the MyFrimleyHealth app for inpatients, completing its modernisation of digital infrastructure and Windows 11, and achieving HIMSS level 6 by 2026/27. By 2027/28, it aims to reach full compliance with DSPT and CAF, deliver agreed clinical programmes from phase one of its AI programme, use smart building technology for estate management, and become a UK leader in Epic optimisation for HIMSS stage 7. Data will be used in driving meaningful decision-making and predictive modelling for demand and capacity by 2028/29, and smart building technologies will be in place across all buildings by 2029/2030.
Medway NHS Foundation Trust
In its recently updated Green Plan, Medway NHS Foundation Trust detailed its digital transformation journey, and how implementing systems like the Sunrise EPR and Patients Know Best has helped “significantly reduce” reliance on printed materials and physical storage. Also shared are future plans to utilise digital tools and technologies to optimise care delivery, enhance data-driven decision making, and reduce the need for patient and staff travel. Virtual pathways will be offered when clinically appropriate, the trust continues, and there are planned upgrades to ageing infrastructure and for the rationalisation of datacentre operations.
From cloud adoption to cloud advantage across the NHS and UK healthcare
By Rackspace Technology
Across NHS organisations, digital transformation is accelerating, but not yet fully aligned. While 40% of organisations report having a formal cloud strategy, few have embedded this into wider organisational objectives. At the same time, 52% say legacy systems significantly limit modernisation, and only 12% consider themselves cyber resilient.
EPR programmes are bringing these challenges into sharp focus.
With 85% of organisations now using electronic patient records, EPR has become more than a clinical system. It is a strategic inflection point, forcing trusts and integrated care boards to modernise core IT environments to meet the demands of performance, availability, security and integration.
However, deployment alone is not enough. Legacy dependencies remain the primary barrier to modernisation for 52% of organisations, while 48% cite cost and unclear return on investment as key constraints. Without broader transformation across surrounding applications and data flows, EPR risks becoming another silo within an already complex estate.
For CIOs, this creates a critical moment. How EPR is operationalised will define the future digital architecture.
This includes taking a deliberate approach to hosting. Today, EPR environments span on premises, vendor managed and cloud models, often shaped by legacy decisions rather than long term strategy. As one of the largest areas of digital investment, EPR also brings cost into sharp focus, with increasing pressure to deliver value for money alongside performance and resilience.
A UK sovereign cloud approach offers a practical way to balance these demands. It enables organisations to maintain control over data residency and meet UK compliance requirements, while also improving cost predictability and reducing the operational burden of managing complex infrastructure.
Rackspace supports NHS organisations with UK-based, security-cleared teams, ITIL-aligned services and flexible hybrid architectures. This allows trusts and integrated care boards to modernise EPR platforms while balancing cost, compliance and long-term sustainability.
The key consideration is that EPR should be treated as the starting point for transformation, not the end state. Decisions made now will determine the ability to integrate, scale and innovate in the future.
Building for the long term means ensuring EPR investments deliver measurable value, align with evolving security and compliance needs, and establish a resilient foundation for continuous digital transformation.
Learn more at https://www.rackspace.com/en-gb/industry/uk-healthcare
Health tech innovation across the South East region
Queen Victoria Hospital introduces EPR
Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has launched its electronic patient record, named “Archie” in honour of surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe. The trust awarded the EPR contract, worth an estimated £10,631,245.25, in 2024 to Insight Direct, subcontracting services to Altera Digital Health. Implementation work began last year, with core elements relating to inpatients, outpatients, electronic prescribing, theatres and minor injuries and reporting modules now live.
“Clinical Blue Light” programme reduces system downtime with live monitoring at Portsmouth Hospitals
A “Clinical Blue Light” programme, which uses AI and automation to monitor clinical systems in real-time, is helping to reduce system downtime at Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust. System performance is tracked, with live data presented in dashboard format, enabling teams to identify issues before they affect frontline services. According to the trust, the approach has helped to “significantly” reduce system downtime. “In its first year, the programme detected and resolved 279 minor incidents and six critical ones—all within 15 minutes,” the trust states. “Crucially, these alerts were picked up both during and outside of working hours, helping maintain consistent performance across the hospital.”
Sussex Community launches remote monitoring tech in care homes to support proactive care
Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust has now deployed remote monitoring tech across 63 local care homes, allowing staff to monitor residents’ vital signs including temperature, pulse, and oxygen levels, generating a NEWS2 score to help detect deterioration early and prevent avoidable hospital admissions. The technology integrates with social care systems like SystmOne, and offers functionality like video calling and secure messaging to support collaboration between care teams and clinicians.
Children’s virtual ward supports early discharge in Oxfordshire
A children’s community nursing Hospital at Home service is helping support early discharge for acutely unwell children in Oxfordshire. The service reportedly discharges an average of 64 children per month, resulting in a “measurable reduction” in 111 calls, admissions, and ED attendances. A new pathway is set to be launched for neonatal jaundice patients, delivering home phototherapy and point-of-care testing for bilirubin.
South East Coast Ambulance Service launches pilot of Ambient Voice in emergency operations
South East Coast Ambulance Service has launched a pilot of Tortus’s ambient voice solution in its emergency operations centres, looking to free-up clinician time to assist more patients. The tool listens in on conversations, transcribing spoken words into structured medical notes to be checked and approved. According to the trust, this is expected to reduce the amount of time taken by clinicians writing up notes following calls.
Surrey and Borders Partnership celebrates digital achievements
In its latest meeting, the board of Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust celebrated a win in the Mental Health category at the HTN Now Awards for their ADAPT+ programme. The programme focuses on enhancing the usability and performance of the trust’s SystmOne EPR, introducing digital tools, structured templates, and electronic prescribing. The board also notes progress to introduce new functionality for colleagues to record indirect activity within the EPR, with hopes of improving data accuracy.
Innovation in Action at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust
In a recent Innovation in Action showcase, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust demonstrated how innovation is delivering change for staff and patients across the region. Case studies included AI note-taking giving staff time back to care, virtual wards supporting better outcomes, and hackathons and digital fellowships building digital skills and promoting a culture of innovation. An innovation strategy is now being developed to support staff to be innovative and create valuable solutions to meaningful problems.
A digital approach at Berkshire Healthcare
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has shared a number of ways digital technologies are being embraced to improve healthcare delivery and patient experience. Microsoft Teams is in use to improve connectivity in rural areas, remote clinical supervision is in practice, and virtual wards and Hospital at Home services are reportedly delivering “measurable benefits”. Patient communications are being modernised with a Digital Appointment Correspondence system, including an initial patient portal for appointment information and text reminders. Services will be moved over to the trust’s new patient portal over the next year to provide a more streamlined experience for patients.
Digital innovation to improve patient care at Buckinghamshire Healthcare
Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust recently updated on digital innovations including the trust’s Quail AI-powered patient experience tool, which brings together information from complaints, PALS, and patient safety incidents to support rapid improvement. The tool has now been scaled nationally through the FDP. Also in use are other AI tools including the Dora conversational AI tool, Skin Analytics for AI-supported skin cancer assessments and triage, and Isla Health’s Central Digital Wound Hub for the remote monitoring of surgical wounds after discharge. “The trust has also become the largest user of the NHS Federated Data platform,” it notes, “using real‑time operational data to improve waiting list management, theatre scheduling and discharge planning, ensuring clinical and operational teams have the information they need to make better decisions for patients.”
Kent and Medway Mental Health introduces tools to capture peer support outcomes in EPR
Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust has introduced three innovations within its digital patient record system to allow for the electronic capture of peer support outcomes. The innovations include the Hope, Agency and Opportunity (HAO) outcome measure, a dedicated peer support intervention tab, and an intended activity SNOMED code. According to the trust, the introduction of these measures means peer support activities and outcomes can be recorded more consistently, building a better understanding of the impact peer support workers have on people’s recovery, and generating evidence to support the development of lived experience roles in mental health care. Peer support practitioners can now record their work directly in patient records, enhancing visibility of these activities alongside other mental health interventions.
Sussex Partnership launches new EPR
Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust has launched the SystmOne EPR, joining around half of local GP practices using SystmOne and East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust and Sussex Community NHS Foundation Trust. Chief medical officer Oliver Dale spoke of seeing early evidence of positive feedback and improvements, noting: “Change can be difficult, and with a change of this size we had anticipated that there would be challenges. In the first few weeks we have seen issues with staff being able to access and use the system, which we know has been frustrating and disruptive. However, with significant effort and focus from colleagues and teams across the trust we are now in a much better position and staff are starting to get into the rhythm of using the new system.”
Insights from the South East region
Overcoming challenges around legacy systems and technical debt
Ben Attwood, CDIO at Oxford University Hospitals, joined our panel for a HTN Now webinar on tackling legacy systems and technical and architectural debt. “I think, like most NHS organisations, we’re managing a level of technical debt that accumulates over time, and we’re taking a risk-prioritised approach to keeping our estate current and resilient,” Ben continued. “We have a long term EPR programme, and that’s been an interesting journey, as when we started there were quite a lot of areas that didn’t have a capability or functionality, so we’ve used a combination of core platform capability and specialist systems to ensure services have the functionality they need.”
“Understanding our HL7 interfaces and batch messaging, how we manage our integration engine – I think every NHS organisation will recognise those as potential areas of debt, and then workarounds which have been put in necessarily to manage workflows, that are well meant, but our job is to remove the need for those heroics,” Ben continued. The trust has focused on consolidating and retiring systems where possible, and absorbing things into its EPR, adhering to modern architecture, APIs, and a FHIR-led approach. “What we’ve found is that when you’re lifting and shifting something without a redesign, you’re just moving cost, you’re not moving value,” he said.
Part of the issue with an acute organisation is the scope, size, and variety of things in provision, covering a whole suite of clinical and operational scenarios, Ben told us. That makes workforce skills very important, bringing people up to speed on the latest developments. “With EPR that’s harder to do, because the workarounds build up, those are cumulative, and every time you add a click you are accumulating a debt. We have to look at reducing those, which has both productivity and wellbeing improvements, so we’re not asking our colleagues to do more work and spend more time clicking through things.”
“We’re always in a cycle of needing to move faster or take on functionality that isn’t fully developed,” Ben told us. “The NHS App is a good example – we’ve got a clear mandate that organisations need to be able to connect to it, but to do that and align various services means differential upgrades or differential reconfiguration. The other thing is to look at the lifecycle of EPR, patient portal, and so on, and then list all the things we need to do which will form the spec of this next big reprocurement or procurement exercise and then build those into that requirement.” The way NHS infrastructure and architecture works, it’s not possible to implement things without some impact or compromise, he added.
A deep dive into ambient scribe tech in NHS trusts with Hampshire and Isle of Wight and Royal Devon
Lauren Riddle, transformation programme manager and Ynez Symonds, CNIO, from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare (HIoW) were among panellists joining us for a HTN Now webinar on ambient scribe technology in NHS trusts.
The trust has now been piloting ambient voice technology for just over six months, Ynez continued, “and from an organisational point of view, I don’t think we’ve struggled with clinician input – all of our clinicians have been really keen”. The pilot has gone out to seven divisions and 26 different profession types and has received some excellent feedback, “but one of the things I’m personally most proud of is the feedback we’ve had from patients on their experience and what it feels like for them to go to a clinical consultation with a clinician using AVT”.
Lauren followed on from Ynez with some of her own experiences and insights from HIoW’s journey to date. “We were already looking at reducing wait times across our services,” she said, “so it wasn’t like we’d seen something shiny and wanted to make it fit; it was very much that there was a need and we wanted to try and solve it.” After being “blown away” reading about a pilot of Tortus AI with several trusts at the end of last year, the decision was made to look into the technology, she went on. “We started small, with 30 people or so, in children’s, and it grew very rapidly from there. We were a victim of our own success, if you like, because the engagement was so good we could have rolled out to 16,000 people there and then.”
Rolling out with multiple suppliers for HIoW’s pilot was “really, really difficult”, Lauren reflected. “It was the most complex pilot I’ve ever been involved in, but I wouldn’t change that – it means we have some very rich data, a strong understanding of what our clinicians need, and an understanding of the different features and functionality that can be provided.” Now that other trusts are moving ahead with their own pilots, Lauren’s team also has a lot of learning to share, she said. “I echo what Dom was saying about the time saving, but we’re actually seeing more like 40 to 50 percent time saved in our sample group, sometimes even higher.”
HIoW is now at the stage where it needs to proceed with the writing of its business case and consider what it might look like to scale across the organisation, Ynez shared. One of the major challenges is in developing a model suitable for the trust’s diverse range of services, she went on, “and whilst it’s great we’ve got 40 – 50 percent productivity gains in some areas, in others it’s quite minimal, so we need to plateau that out and understand what it looks like across the entire organisation”.
