The data exists… but how can I get my hands on it?
Person data in maternity and neonatal settings largely exists. What we hear consistently from NHS organisations is that this information can be difficult, sometimes practically impossible, to access where and when it’s needed.
Why is this problematic? Because historical person information is often distributed across multiple systems, formats and timeframes, making it difficult to view as a coherent whole. Improving maternity and neonatal safety and assurance depends less on creating new information, and more on making existing information connected, visible and usable.
Seek progress over perfection!
So, how can healthcare organisations begin to address this? My advice: don’t try to tackle everything at once, and resist the temptation to seek a single solution – in my experience, there’s rarely a ‘silver bullet’ to solve all ills. And, importantly, in complex environments, like maternity and neonatal services, perfection is often the enemy of progress.
The goal is to identify steps that move organisations towards a more reliable, accessible view of a person’s maternity and neonatal history. With that in mind, I have set out five guiding principles for you to consider as part of your data management strategy for maternity and neonatal environments.
Five guiding principles for improving access to maternity and neonatal history
These principles aren’t intended as a fixed model or a one-size-fits-all solution. After all, every NHS organisation is starting from a different place, with its own systems, constraints and priorities. Think of them as a practical way of framing what ‘good’ could look like – and a reminder that we’re seeking progress, not wholesale transformation.
1) A longitudinal view of care
Maternity and neonatal services inherently depend on longitudinal data available as a continuous narrative, spanning multiple pregnancies, organisations and points of care.
In practice, this means clinicians can understand how current presentations relate to previous pregnancies, complications or safeguarding considerations, without needing to navigate multiple systems to piece that history together.
2) Accessibility within existing workflows
Access to historical information is only valuable if it is available at the point of care. Where clinicians are required to leave their primary workflow to search for information, reliance on workarounds becomes inevitable.
Improving accessibility is, therefore, less about where data is stored and more about how it is presented. The aim is to ensure that relevant history is surfaced within existing clinical systems and workflows – enabling decisions to be made with confidence, without adding friction or delay. In practical terms, this means minimising the number of systems a clinician must navigate to build a complete picture.
3) Clarity over completeness
In high-pressure clinical environments, the challenge is not simply access to information, but the ability to interpret it quickly and accurately. Large volumes of unstructured or poorly organised data can be as problematic as missing information.
A focus on clarity over completeness recognises that clinicians need context, not clutter. In practice, this means prioritising structured, well-organised presentation of the most relevant information – rather than simply making everything available and leaving the clinician to filter it.
4) Reduction in workarounds
Workarounds are often a pragmatic response to fragmented systems and data but, in time, they introduce risk, inconsistency and inefficiency. Reliance on multiple manual searches, tracking down paper records or informal knowledge increases the likelihood that important context is missed or misinterpreted.
Reducing these workarounds is a key indicator of progress. As access to information becomes more reliable and consistent, the need for workarounds diminishes, improving both clinical efficiency and confidence.
5) Confidence in retrospective review
In maternity and neonatal departments, decisions are frequently reviewed weeks, months or years later. In those moments, organisations must be able to demonstrate not only what happened, but why decisions were made.
Confidence in retrospective review comes from having a clear, coherent record that reflects the information available at the time. When this is in place, the focus can shift from reconstruction to understanding, supporting fairer review processes and more effective organisational learning.
How NHS organisations are improving access to maternity and neonatal history
While the principles outlined above provide a useful way of thinking about what ‘good’ looks like, what we are seeing across the NHS is a set of common, practical approaches beginning to emerge. In many organisations, the first step is understanding where maternity and neonatal history currently resides. Data is often spread across a combination of current and legacy systems, EPR platforms, scanned records and paper archives.
Once you know where the data lives, you are able to hone in on reducing fragmentation, improving access to historical information from legacy environments, and making that information visible within existing clinical workflows.
Don’t overlook legacy maternity and neonatal systems
One area that often gets overlooked is what happens when a maternity or neonatal EPR is replaced. As a number of NHS trusts have discovered, the data held in the retiring system doesn’t automatically follow you to the new one. In many cases, that historical information becomes stranded – technically accessible in theory, but frustratingly hard to retrieve in practice. Making sure it remains visible within current clinical workflows is one of the more tangible steps an organisation can take, and one of the most underestimated.
The scale of this challenge is not hypothetical. In December 2023, NHS England issued a National Patient Safety Alert concerning the Euroking maternity EPR – then in use at approximately 15 NHS trusts. The alert identified that data recorded in the system could overwrite previously captured information, including safeguarding records and pregnancy history, with the potential to mislead clinicians. According to Digital Health, in its article “Euroking patient safety alert: 13 trusts switch supplier” published on 15th April 2024, 13 of those 15 trusts had either moved to a new system or were actively doing so. The Euroking situation is an unusually visible example of something that happens more quietly across the NHS every year: maternity and neonatal systems are replaced, and the data left behind requires careful, deliberate management if it is to remain clinically useful and safely accessible.
The governance stakes are rising
The governance pressure around information access is not easing. In a blog published in July 2025 by the Director of Freedom of Information at the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) entitled, “Successes and setbacks: ICO reports on FOI compliance across NHS trusts in England”, reported that FOI compliance rates across NHS Trusts in England range from as low as 10% to 100%. The average score was cited as 82% but, it was noticeably less for large trusts (with over 10,000 employees) where the average dropped to just 71% (with average backlogs of 86 outstanding requests). The ICO also noted it is facing record levels of complaints.
The picture on Subject Access Requests (SARs) tells a similar story. In December 2024, the ICO reprimanded an NHS Trust for failing to respond to 32% of SARs within the statutory one-month deadline, citing inadequate systems for locating and managing the data needed to fulfil those requests. In both cases, the root cause is familiar – information that exists but cannot be readily found.
Taken together, these are the areas where practical progress is being made – and where the case for a more joined-up approach to managing maternity and neonatal information is becoming harder to ignore.
Towards a more unified approach to managing maternity and neonatal information
As organisations begin to take these steps, a common pattern starts to emerge. While individual initiatives can reduce specific access challenges, fragmentation often remains, with historical and current information continuing to sit across multiple systems.
In this context, a more unified approach does not mean replacing existing maternity, neonatal or EPR systems. Instead, it focuses on bringing information from across these environments into a coherent, accessible view – one that reflects the full history of care, regardless of where that information was originally created.
As a result, organisations are increasingly exploring ways to introduce a layer of capability that connects information across systems and over time – improving how it is accessed, understood and trusted, at the point of need.
From principle to practice – how this can be achieved
One approach to delivering this in practice is a clinical data repository (or CDR) that works alongside existing maternity and neonatal systems, Trust-wide EPRs and other clinical applications rather than replacing them. It’s an approach BridgeHead has been developing for NHS organisations for a number of years, and one that continues to evolve to meet the needs of both NHS and private healthcare providers.
BridgeHead’s CDR, HealthStore®, has been designed to do exactly that – bringing together historical and current clinical information into a single, coherent view, without disrupting existing clinical workflows or requiring system replacement.
HealthStore manages and provides access to clinical information across systems and over time, ensuring that relevant history is available where and when it’s needed, both at the point of care and for retrospective review.
Grounding in NHS reality
This is particularly relevant in environments where maternity or neonatal systems have been replaced – a scenario that is increasingly common as NHS Trusts modernise their clinical applications and infrastructure. In those circumstances, historical data from decommissioned systems remains critical for ongoing care and retrospective review, but is often the hardest to access.
By making historical information accessible alongside current records, organisations are able to improve continuity of information, support more confident decision-making, and reduce the effort required to respond to investigations, requests and reviews.
Importantly, this is not about introducing additional complexity or creating parallel systems. The focus is on enhancing access to information that already exists – working alongside established clinical platforms to provide a more complete and reliable view of maternity and neonatal history.
Improving access to maternity and neonatal history – a step towards safer, more confident care
What is increasingly clear is that expectations around transparency, accountability and learning will continue to increase. In that context, the ability to access and trust historical information is becoming central not only to how care is delivered, but to how it is understood and reviewed over time.
The organisations we speak to aren’t looking for more data. They’re looking for confidence – that clinicians are seeing the full picture when making decisions, and that those decisions can be clearly understood when they’re revisited later. Progress towards that goal doesn’t come from a single initiative, but from a series of practical steps that reduce the need for reconstruction and improve how information flows across maternity and neonatal services.
If this is something your organisation is currently exploring, or if you would like to understand how others are approaching these challenges, we’d welcome the opportunity to continue the conversation. You can reach me by email: john.mccann@bridgeheadsoftware.com; or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Working in tech marketing for almost 30 years, and specifically in health tech for the last 15 years, John is passionate about the issues faced by healthcare providers and is convinced that technology, when specified and implemented correctly, can be a ‘game changer’ in the delivery of patient care.
At BridgeHead Software, John is working to disrupt the myopia around healthcare applications instead supporting the view that data (and not applications) is the strategic asset by which patient outcomes and experience can be improved.
