Trends in digital health
Healthcare's next chapter is coordination.
What's happening now. What's happening next. Who is responsible.
Everywhere in healthcare you'll find digital records. Legacy systemsSometimes called EMR (Electronic Medical Record), EPR (Electronic Patient Record) or EHR (Electronic Health Record) — the same concept under different names, used across different countries and health systems, all built for the same original purpose: documenting clinical encounters. built from early attempts at digitisation.
The changes over the last decade now mean that most healthcare staff — including all our doctors and nurses — spend more than half their working day staring at a screen. They spend more time entering data than talking to patients.
We think that's wrong.
Because — despite the human cost of all this data entry — across every shift, every handover, every referral and every transfer, the three most important questions about patient care remain remarkably difficult to answer:
What's happening now?
What's happening next?
Who is responsible?
These legacy systems were born out of finance and operations. They were never designed to answer these clinically important questions.
Legacy systems record what happened. They are not coordinators of care.
CAREFUL is the platform that fills the gap.
The digital record was a revolution. It was also a category error.
Digital records were the right answer to a real problem. Paper notes were illegible, unsearchable, and impossible to audit. Digitisation transformed how healthcare data is stored, retrieved and analysed.
But the legacy system is fundamentally a record. It captures what was decided, what was prescribed, what was observed. It does not coordinate what happens next. It does not name who is responsible for the open thread of care. It does not show every team caring for the patient what the others are doing, in real time. It was not designed to.
A 2016 AMA study found physicians spend 49% of their time on these systems and only 27% with patients. In 2024, a multicentre study of 137 NHS Resident Doctors confirmed the same pattern: 73% of their time on non-patient-facing tasks, 18% on patient-facing work — four hours of administration for every hour with patients. The full picture is in our deep-dive on why the legacy record was built around billing.
The result is a paradox. Health services have spent two decades and tens of billions on systems that capture every clinical encounter — and clinicians still cannot answer the simplest questions about their patients without phoning, paging, chasing or guessing.
The three questions
Three questions are hardest to answer about any patient in any care setting.
What's happening now?
Where is the patient — both physically and in their journey, through your institution and on their path from illness to health? What is being done for them today, even this minute? Do you actually know where they are?
What's happening next?
What's the next action or task for this patient? How do we make that decision? When is it due? Has it been ordered? Who knows about this?
Who is responsible?
If something is going to be done, who is doing it? Whose name is against that open task? Who is accountable when the shift changes, when the patient moves between care settings, between teams? Where does the responsibility lie?
In a well-run team, these questions get answered through verbal handover, paper lists, bleeps, group chat and institutional memory. In a busy acute setting, in a community team, in aged care or across organisational boundaries, they don't. They are reconstructed every shift, every handover, and every referral — at considerable cost in time, error and risk.
What the legacy system records, and what it doesn't
The legacy system captures
- Encounters, episodes, admissions and discharges
- Diagnoses, problems and clinical observations
- Test results, prescriptions and orders
- Notes and letters
- Billing codes and audit data
The legacy system does not capture
- What's happening now, in real time, across teams
- What's happening next, with named owners and due dates
- Who is responsible for each open thread of care
- The conversation around a referral or handover
- Status visible to every team caring for the same patient
This is not a flaw of legacy systems. It is a feature of what they were built for. They are records of clinical encounters, designed for documentation, regulation and reimbursement. The questions of live coordination — now, next, responsibility — were left to the human layer of bleeps, sticky notes, WhatsApp groups and verbal handovers. That layer no longer scales.
What CAREFUL does
CAREFUL captures, tracks and coordinates what the legacy system cannot. It is built around the three questions.
What's happening now
Every patient has a live status visible to every authorised team member, regardless of which team or organisation they belong to. The status updates in real time as the team works.
What's happening next
Every clinical decision becomes a tracked action with a named owner and a due date. Decisions made in MDTs, on ward rounds, in referrals or in chat messages all become structured, accountable work.
Who is responsible
Every action, every patient, every handover and every referral has explicit, named ownership. Receiving teams accept or reject; nothing is silently dropped. The audit trail is complete.
CAREFUL works alongside any legacy system. It does not replace the record; it adds the coordination the record was never designed to provide.
Where this matters most
The same three questions need answering in every clinical context. CAREFUL is used wherever the answers matter most:
Bleep replacement
Replacing one-way pagers with named, owned actions.
Clinical handover
Transferring not just information but live, open work.
Referrals
Ensuring every referral has a recipient who has accepted ownership.
Non-urgent task management
Replacing handwritten lists and chat-based requests.
Secure clinical messaging
Turning conversations into tracked actions.
MDT coordination
Ensuring meeting decisions become completed care.
Discharge coordination
Aligning every team that needs to act before a patient leaves.
Cancer pathway coordination
Keeping every step of a complex pathway named and visible.
Emergency department
Replacing whiteboards and paper lists with shared, live status.
Cross-organisation care
Connecting hospitals, GPs, community and aged care in one shared plan.
Aged care
Coordinating between facilities, hospitals, GPs and family.
Hospital at Night
Coordinating a small overnight team responsible for hundreds of patients across multiple wards.
ICU
Coordinating the heaviest patient-care load in the hospital, with named ownership across every escalation and step-down.
Evidence
- At Hywel Dda University Health Board, CAREFUL saved doctors 30–60 minutes per shift on the acute medical take.
- At Withybush General Hospital, CAREFUL reduced cardiology referral time from 22.5 minutes to under 1 minute.
- CAREFUL has cut ED wait times by 50% in implementations across NHS Wales.
- 98% of CAREFUL users in independent surveys report improved patient safety.
Frequently asked questions
Why isn't a legacy system (EMR, EPR or EHR) enough on its own?
A legacy system is a record of clinical encounters. It captures what was decided, prescribed and observed. It does not coordinate what's happening now, what's happening next, or who is responsible for each open thread of care. Those questions of live coordination — across teams, shifts and organisations — are what CAREFUL answers.
What is “healthcare's next chapter”?
The next chapter is the live clinical coordination work that legacy systems were never designed to handle: real-time actions, structured handovers, accept/reject referrals, named ownership, and visibility across teams and organisations. CAREFUL is built specifically for this work.
How is CAREFUL different from a legacy system (EMR, EPR or EHR)?
A legacy system is a record. CAREFUL is a coordination platform. The legacy system captures what happened; CAREFUL captures what's happening now, what's happening next, and who is responsible — with named ownership, due dates and audit trails. CAREFUL works alongside any legacy system.
Does CAREFUL replace the EMR, EPR or EHR?
No. CAREFUL is not a legacy system replacement. It works alongside any legacy system, adding the coordination layer that legacy systems do not provide. Organisations continue to use their legacy system for the record of care; CAREFUL is the platform on which the team coordinates that care.
What care settings does CAREFUL work in?
CAREFUL is used in acute hospitals, emergency departments, oncology services, aged care facilities, community providers and across organisational boundaries. The platform is care-setting-agnostic because the three questions it answers — now, next, responsibility — are the same in every setting.
Is CAREFUL DTAC compliant?
Yes. CAREFUL is registered on the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit, holds Cyber Essentials Plus certification, complies with DCB0129 clinical safety standards, and is ICO registered (ZA249706). The platform runs on Microsoft Azure with appropriate data sovereignty controls.