A 2025 NHS report shows 93% of trusts have an EPR but only 30% have fully integrated data flows. Here’s what that means for school nursing and child health services.
If you work in community or public health, you’ll know the feeling. You’ve got a digital system. Maybe two or three. You can log in, record what you need, pull a report when someone asks for one. On paper, you are a “digital” service.
Then a parent phones to ask about their child’s results and you find yourself flicking between tabs, copying numbers from one screen into another and double-checking the spelling of a surname in three places because nothing is quite talking to anything else.
Having a digital system is not the same as having joined-up digital working.
The 93% vs 30% gap
A Digital Health article published in March, drawing on the 2025 Digital Maturity Assessment, put a number on this. 93% of NHS providers now have an Electronic Patient Record in place. Only 30% have fully integrated bi-directional data flows.
In other words, most trusts have the kit. Far fewer have the kit talking to each other properly.
NHS England flagged in the same report that the lack of integrated data flows is limiting system-wide productivity. Thomas Webb at Ethical Healthcare Consulting put it neatly: this isn’t really a technology problem anymore. It’s a training, workflow and good-practice question.
For frontline child health teams, that distinction matters a lot.
What it looks like on the ground
Take a typical school nursing service. In a single week, the team might be running vision and hearing screening across Reception, finishing off NCMP measurements, working through a backlog of health needs assessments for Year 6 and Year 9, and trying to share results with clinicians and parents.
If the systems involved don’t connect well, results can end up being entered in more than one place, and people spend time checking details by hand that should already be sitting in the record. When different parts of the service use different platforms, it’s also harder to get a single, current view of where each child is in their care.
None of this is anyone’s fault. NHS teams are working with whatever they’ve been given, and EPR suppliers are doing their best to serve a huge, complicated ecosystem. But the cumulative effect is real. Staff spend time on admin that could be spent with children, young people and families. Reporting gets harder. Follow-up slips. And the experience for the family on the receiving end is often more disjointed than it needs to be.
Integration is not just a technical detail
It’s tempting to think of integration as something the IT team worries about. In practice, it touches almost every part of a service.
Safety is one part of it. Clinicians need to see the full picture, not just the bit that lives in their system. Productivity is another: every extra manual step adds up across a busy caseload. Then there’s reporting, which gets much harder when data is trapped in different places and commissioners are looking for clear evidence of impact. And user experience matters too, both for staff who are tired of duplicate logins and for families who’d rather not repeat the same information four times to four different people.
This is the bit we think about a lot at SchoolScreener.
The platform is built around the 0-19 Healthy Child Programme, covering vision and hearing screening, NCMP, health needs assessments, immunisations and oral health. The integrations matter just as much as the clinical modules.
In practical terms, SchoolScreener currently has integrations with SystmOne, EMIS and Rio, so screening results and contacts can flow back into the records clinicians are already using. Bulk CSV import and export also takes a lot of the manual work out of moving cohort data around, so the team isn’t doing it one by one.
None of that is glamorous. It’s the kind of thing nobody notices when it works, and everyone notices when it doesn’t.
A more hopeful picture than it sounds
The DMA actually paints a fairly hopeful picture overall. Around 90% of staff can now access a shared care record. 90% of providers have a central data repository. The infrastructure is largely there.
The hard, less visible work now is making sure the systems we already have can actually talk to each other, and that the people using them have the time and training to get the most out of them. That second piece matters too. The companion EPR usability survey found that 60% of doctors and 70% of nurses want more training on the EPRs they use every day, and 44% had received no further training after joining their organisation. The technology has moved on. The investment in how people use it hasn’t always kept pace.
If any of this sounds familiar
If you’re in an NHS trust, local authority or public health team and you’re trying to work out how a child health service can sit more comfortably alongside your EPR and shared care record, we’d be happy to have a conversation. Let’s find out where the friction is in your current setup and whether SchoolScreener could help take some of it away.