In 2025 the NHS faces a pivotal year in its digital transformation journey, guided by ambitious national policies and propelled by new technologies
NHS England’s plan for digital health has set clear targets – including 90% of NHS trusts to have electronic health records by the end of 2023 and 100% by March 2025. At the same time, funding initiatives and interoperability goals are accelerating progress: from “frontline digitisation” programmes investing in electronic patient records (EPRs) to integrated care systems (ICS) connecting services with shared data platforms.
How can emerging solutions, like Cambric’s Morse, help NHS organisations meet these priorities and overcome the practical challenges?
Below, we explore how mobile, offline-first technology, AI integration and improved interoperability can support NHS trusts in delivering on 2025’s digital aspirations – improving patient care, boosting workforce efficiency and ensuring cost-effective use of resources.
NHS policy drivers for digital transformation in 2025
Several major policy drivers are shaping NHS digital plans in 2025, emphasizing unified records, connectivity and raised digital maturity:
- Universal EPR Adoption: The government expects every NHS trust to have a core electronic patient record system in place next month. This builds on the A Plan for Digital Health and Social Care (2022), which provided funding and support for all ICSs and trusts to establish “core digital capabilities” (including EPRs) by the same time period.
- Interoperability and ICS Integration: There is a strong push for joined-up care through data sharing. By 2024, all constituent organisations of an ICS are expected to be connected to an integrated health and care record, giving clinicians appropriate access to a complete view of a person’s information across settings. This means community, hospital and social care systems must talk to each other seamlessly – a key NHS goal to improve continuity of care.
- Digital Maturity and Funding: NHS England’s What Good Looks Like framework and Digital Capability Framework define the digital maturity standards trusts should achieve. National programmes such as the Digital Aspirant scheme and Unified Tech Fund back these goals with investment. The 2024 Spring Budget earmarked £3.4 billion in 2025/26 for NHS technology and digital transformation to drive productivity and support the Long Term Workforce Plan. This funding aims to level-up lagging organisations, modernise infrastructure and ensure even resource-constrained trusts can upgrade legacy systems.
Crucially, all these policies share a common rationale: digital transformation is seen as essential to freeing up staff time, reducing pressure on services, and providing more seamless, efficient care for patients. NHS leaders are tasked with not only installing new systems, but doing so in a way that improves outcomes and delivers tangible benefits on the front line.
Mobile, AI and Interoperability: Tech trends shaping EPR solutions
The good news is that a wave of emerging technologies is aligning with these NHS priorities, making 2025 an exciting year for innovation in electronic records:
- Offline-First Mobile EPR: Healthcare is increasingly happening beyond hospital walls, which means clinicians need reliable access to records on the move. Mobile, offline-capable EPR solutions have become game-changers. For example, NHS Orkney is rolling out Cambric’s Morse EPR app to community teams in early 2025, specifically because it provides easy access to patient data anywhere – even across remote islands with unreliable connectivity. Staff can download the latest records at the start of the day, update notes during visits, and sync back to the main system when network connectivity is available. This offline-first design ensures no care delay caused by connectivity “not-spots”, and it replaces cumbersome paper case notes, greatly reducing errors and lost files. The result is clinicians spending less time chasing information and more time with patients, while also benefiting from improved data quality from services historically underserved by healthcare IT systems. This provides the organisation with both clinical outcomes and workforce data, enabling informed investment into the services that need it most.
- AI-Augmented Care: 2025 is poised to see AI move from buzzword to practical assistant in healthcare. NHS digital leaders predict an expansion of remote monitoring tools, AI “bots” and even generative AI to support clinical and operational decision-making. Modern EPR platforms are beginning to integrate AI-driven features – from intelligent alerting (e.g. warning of risky trends in a patient’s observations) to automating routine documentation tasks. The Morse platform, for instance, includes intelligent workflows that can trigger actions based on data input (such as auto-generating a referral when certain criteria are met). These kinds of integrations hint at what the future of AI in healthcare might look like, with potential opportunities to streamline processes like triage or care planning. NHS organisations will need to ensure robust governance for any AI tools, focusing on the ethical application of technology and measuring its value in patient outcomes. When applied thoughtfully, AI-enabled EPR systems could help overstretched teams by flagging at-risk patients, suggesting treatment options, or predicting demand – augmenting human decision-making rather than replacing it.
- Improved Interoperability: Breaking down data silos is a top priority to achieve truly integrated care. Emerging standards (like FHIR APIs and national interoperability frameworks) are enabling different systems to share information more easily. Real-world examples show the impact: In NHS Fife, Cambric’s Morse EPR was recently integrated with the Health Board’s Orion Health portal so that all patient appointments – whether booked by community teams in Morse or by acute hospital teams in the TrakCare system – can be viewed in one place. This development eliminated the need to duplicate appointment entries on separate systems, saving administrative time and providing clinicians with a more complete view of each patient’s care pathway. Similarly, Morse’s open API approach allows it to pull and push data to any third-party system in use whilst also providing a solution for community services, which are increasingly in demand and need appropriate systems to support their clinicians and support teams. It enhances data quality in services historically underserved by healthcare IT, ensuring that a Trust can deploy it alongside existing hospital EPRs or shared care records without starting from scratch. The NHS’s interoperability goal of “information in the right place at the right time” is advanced by such solutions, as they ensure that community nurses, hospital doctors, GP practices and social care workers can all access up-to-date patient information as needed. In practice, better data sharing translates to fewer delays (for example, when discharging a patient to community care) and safer care (everyone involved knows the latest medications, allergies, or care plans).
Overcoming challenges in implementation
Implementing digital solutions at scale is not without challenges. NHS Trusts often face constraints around funding, infrastructure and workforce adoption. Many organisations still have aging legacy systems and limited capital budgets – indeed, short-term funding pots and procurement hurdles have been cited as barriers to rapid digital implementation. Integrating new EPRs with multiple existing systems (PAS, labs, social care systems, etc.) can be technically complex.
On the human side, change management is a major task: busy healthcare staff need training and time to adapt to new digital workflows, or there’s a risk technology might initially slow them down. Additionally, patchy network connectivity (especially for rural hospitals or community services) can hinder the always-online assumption of many digital tools. All these issues can slow progress and dilute the benefits if not addressed head-on.
This is where choosing the right, scalable solution makes all the difference. Cambric’s Morse EPR is a prime example of a technology designed to mitigate these implementation challenges. First, its offline-first capability directly tackles the connectivity problem – a clinician in a patient’s home or a rural clinic can retrieve and update records on a tablet or laptop without any signal, and simply sync later.
NHS Orkney’s deployment of Morse highlights this advantage: the health board serves a widely dispersed island population, and enabling staff to work without worrying about 4G coverage is transformative for their workflow. The app’s use in Orkney is initially focused on community mental health teams and will expand to nurses and physiotherapists, with the goal of saving time and replacing manual paperwork in case notes. By digitising formerly paper-based tasks, the trust expects to reduce errors from illegible or lost paperwork and improve data accuracy.
Early feedback from Orkney’s clinicians has been positive – they see Morse as “enabling, connecting and empowering our staff”, leading to a more productive workforce and even financial benefits through efficiency. In short, solving the on-the-ground frustrations (no Wi-Fi, chasing paper files) boosts staff buy-in for digital change.
Secondly, Morse’s emphasis on integration helps overcome the legacy IT hurdle. Rather than forcing a rip-and-replace of existing systems, it acts as an agnostic layer that links into whatever patient databases or portals a trust already uses. The NHS Fife example illustrates this interoperability in action: by collaborating with the Orion portal, Morse allowed information recorded in one system to be visible in another, creating a unified view for clinicians without massive new infrastructure.
This kind of plug-in approach means trusts can incrementally enhance their digital capability. They can roll out a mobile EPR app to frontline teams and gradually integrate additional feeds (referrals, test results, etc.) over time, avoiding the “big bang” deployments that often overwhelm staff. It also future-proofs the investment – as national data sharing networks and standards evolve, an open, API-driven system can adapt and connect, whereas a closed, monolithic system might struggle.
Finally, addressing the people side of transformation is key. Here too, having a user-friendly, flexible solution helps. Scalable EPR platforms like Morse are developed with clinician input (through initiatives like the Morse Steering Group of NHS users) so that the interface and workflows make sense to end-users. Features such as intuitive forms, shared team messaging, and alerts for important updates are aimed at fitting seamlessly into clinical practice.
When technology adds to clinicians’ day (e.g. by automating a time-consuming task or preventing duplicate data entry) rather than adding another burden, staff are far more likely to embrace it. Cambric’s managing director noted that delivering the right information at the point of care “frees healthcare professionals to concentrate on the patient and not administration”, supporting wider NHS goals of improving outcomes through digital means. This speaks to a broader truth: true digital transformation happens when frontline users feel the tech is working for them, not the other way around.
The road ahead: Priorities for the year ahead
As NHS organisations push through the remainder of their 2025 digital agenda, the focus will shift from simply implementing systems to optimising and transforming care through them. Achieving universal EPR coverage is a milestone – but the next step is to fully leverage those digital tools to improve service delivery. In the year ahead, NHS leaders should prioritise a few key areas:
- Embed and Innovate: With core digital infrastructure in place, trusts can turn to innovation on top of it. This means using the rich data now captured in EPRs to drive proactive population health management and analytics, and scaling up successful pilots (for example, remote patient monitoring or virtual wards) across integrated care systems. The NHS Long Term Plan’s vision of more “community, proactive care” can be enabled by digital tech that identifies at-risk patients and supports them at home. AI will likely play a growing role here – from predictive algorithms that help manage demand to AI assistants for clinicians – but it must be introduced with robust governance. Leaders will need to ensure the ethical use of AI and carefully measure its impact, so that these tools truly add value to patient care and safety.
- Interoperability as Default: As we move beyond siloed deployments, 2025 should be the year of connecting the dots. NHS trusts should prioritise joining up systems within and across organisational boundaries. This might involve participating fully in regional Shared Care Records, using national interoperability standards for any new procurements, and working with suppliers like Cambric who embrace open integration. The goal is that a patient’s journey – from GP to hospital to community care – is supported by a continuous digital thread of information. Efforts such as NHS England’s target architecture and the push for federated data platforms are setting the direction. Locally, CIOs and CCIOs can champion projects that demonstrate real-world interoperability benefits (as seen in the NHS Fife appointments integration, which improved both efficiency and care coordination). Over time, reducing the friction between systems will directly translate into better, safer patient experiences.
- Culture and Skills: Digital transformation is as much about people as technology. In the coming year, NHS organisations should invest in developing their digital workforce capabilities. This includes training clinicians in new digital tools, hiring or upskilling data and IT talent, and fostering a culture of innovation where staff feel confident using technology to improve care. Many trusts are appointing Chief Nursing Information Officers (CNIOs) and Clinical Safety Officers, recognising that strong clinical leadership in digital is vital to guide safe and effective adoption. Frontline staff need to see continuous support – not just at go-live, but as systems evolve – and to have avenues for feedback and improvement. By prioritising user engagement and digital literacy, organisations can ensure that the tech investments actually yield the intended productivity gains and quality improvements on the wards and in clinics.
Looking beyond 2025, it’s clear that the digitisation of the NHS is an ongoing journey rather than a one-off destination. The foundations being laid now – universal electronic records, connected data flows, and a workforce open to innovation – will enable the next leaps in healthcare transformation. We can expect future years to bring even more advanced AI diagnostics, greater patient empowerment through apps and wearables, and new care models that blur traditional boundaries. But success in that future depends on getting the basics right today.
For NHS decision-makers, the message for 2025 is to keep momentum and focus on value. Every digital initiative should ultimately be judged by how it improves patient care, enhances staff efficiency, or saves resources. Scalable platforms like Cambric’s Morse EPR demonstrate how aligning with NHS priorities – mobile access, interoperability, user-centric design – can turn policy goals into practical benefits at the front line. By embracing such innovations and addressing the cultural and logistical challenges that come with them, NHS leaders can ensure that digital transformation delivers on its promise: a smarter, more connected health service that is fit for the future, improving outcomes for patients and easing the burden on our invaluable healthcare workforce.
