David Elliott, executive chief digital information officer at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (Credit: Northumbria Healthcare)
“Getting the basics right” is key to the digital strategy that helped Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust rank as the best-performing large hospital trust in England, said David Elliott, the trust’s executive chief digital information officer (CDIO).
Northumbria Healthcare came number nine in the NHS acute trust league tables, published on 9 September 2025, with specialist hospitals occupying the top eight spots.
Elliott told Digital Health News that there had been “steep investment in digital” since 2017 when the trust was badly affected by the NHS WannaCry cyber attack.
When he joined the trust seven years ago, Elliott’s priority was ensuring that infrastructure was reliable, which included ensuring that PCs at the organisation were no more than four years old and providing handheld devices to every staff member.
“We started to put digital access to systems in the hands of the clinicians and the nurses and made sure that everything works as well as it possibly can do when you switch it on.
“That was just a crusade to get the downtime from an average of 36 lost hours per person per year down to the current average of under 10, maybe eight or nine,” Elliott said.
Nervecentre provides certain elements of Northumbria’s digital patient record, however the trust has transitioned from reliance on suppliers to a more self-directed development model.
“We effectively got investment for a development team to start looking at developing our own parts of the digital patient record that weren’t readily available or didn’t do the functionality that we wanted.
“We’ve got a 30-strong development team that sits and develops our OneView system, which is effectively the centre of our digital patient record. That allows us to make really quick changes.
“We have two-week development sprints which allow us to make changes to the application based on feedback from the clinicians and the whole idea of it is that it’s for the NHS by the NHS,” Elliott explained.
In March 2025, the trust acquired the business of Health Call Solutions Limited to increase its range of software products.
Elliott said that the idea is “to build Health Call up, customise it and continue to sell it on to other providers” and then reinforce the cycle of investment back into the trust’s digital team.
Looking ahead, Northumbria is focused on accelerating the analogue to digital shift outlined in the government’s 10 year health plan by exploring smarter appointment management using AI and machine learning to reduce unnecessary hospital visits.
It also plans to adopt ambient voice technology, and build on its did not attend (DNA) system that predicts and reduces missed appointments.
The trust is taking a pragmatic approach to the use of AI .
“I think the key bit is to just make sure we’re sticking with the problem that we’re solving.
“We still have all the technical and digital problems that we have in the NHS and AI should just be a potential tool to solve some of the things – there are other avenues to go down.
“I think if we stick to the problem that we’re trying to solve, that’s the ethos we have in Northumbria and we’ll come up with how we solve it and what the potential options are for solving it.
“AI will definitely form part of it, but we don’t lead with it,” Elliott said.
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