A Smarter Way to Retrieve NHS Numbers in Healthcare Workflows.

Unified Child Healthcare

The ability to share information across child healthcare, social care, and education to better support children is clearly crucial, but unfortunately, many are working with a reality of fragmented systems and silos, which prevent effective care coordination, creating gaps in information, delays in interventions, and poorer outcomes for the most vulnerable children.

Recognising these challenges, national strategies, such as the government's ‘Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive’ proposal and advocacy from organisations like the RCPCH are driving change. 

These strategies advocate for the expanded use of the NHS number as a single, lifelong identifier to link patient information across systems and agencies, to enhance safeguarding, improve care coordination, and facilitate better data sharing and analysis across health and social care systems.

We fully support this vision and see the immense value of a unique patient identifier. However, after speaking with clinicians, parents, and administrative staff, we discovered a key challenge:

Finding the correct NHS number isn’t always easy.

It can be time-consuming, requiring external system searches. Inaccurate or incomplete data, whether missing demographic details or manual entry errors, further reduces match rates, creating extra work for teams.

We quickly realized that while the NHS number is critical for unified care, its expansion of use is only unlocked when access to NHS number retrieval is easy and integrated within existing workflows.

A well-designed workflow is like a well-prepared kitchen. A chef wouldn’t start cooking without first setting up their mise en place, everything they need arranged neatly and within reach. If they had to stop every few minutes to fetch an ingredient, the constant interruptions would slow them down, introduce errors, and make their work unnecessarily difficult.

The same principle applies to clinicians and administrative staff. They shouldn’t have to break focus to search for essential patient information or navigate external systems to verify details. 

A well-designed system anticipates their needs, ensuring everything is in place at the moment it’s required. Workflow design matters. Digital tools should adapt to how people work, not the other way around.

To overcome these challenges and support the use of NHS numbers, we developed our NHS Number Tracing module in close collaboration with NHS teams. 

Fully integrated across all our applications, this module connects directly to the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) to instantly retrieve NHS numbers during key workflow stages, whether during cohort uploads, consent submissions, or within patient records. It also automatically detects errors and validates information in real time, guaranteeing a high success rate of accurate matches.

We have found that by integrating NHS number retrieval into routine workflows, it eliminates inefficiencies, allowing clinicians and admin staff to quickly and accurately identify patients without extra steps. This streamlines data entry, reduces errors, and improves patient safety.

By making NHS numbers readily accessible within workflows, we support the long-term vision of integrated care, ensuring that patient data is accurate, complete, and available when needed. Our work also demonstrates how technology can transform existing tools by making them more accessible, intuitive, and efficient.

Learn more about our NHS Number Tracing module and how it can improve your team's workflows. Contact us for a demo or to talk more, we’d love to hear from you.