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Creating a Single-Patient Record: A Guide for Healthcare Leaders
Within healthcare systems worldwide, stakeholders at every level—practitioners, administrators, and patients themselves—are advocating for a shift away from group- or system-wide perspectives, and toward a single-patient record (SPR). But what does it mean, what are the benefits, and what are the challenges?
What is single-patient record?
In healthcare, the SPR functions as a grand, unified picture of a patient, encompassing information from all of the systems, providers, clinics and labs with which they’ve interacted into one single data repository (usually a portal). By consolidating records from all of these disparate sources, the SPR provides a comprehensive and complete picture of a patient’s health history and current status. This allows any clinician to jump in at the point of care with a fuller understanding of the patient in front of them—and consequently, with a greater ability to treat and support that patient’s unique health needs.
While electronic health records (EHRs), which combine many practitioners into one portal, are increasingly the norm in healthcare, these tend to be limited across one hospital or medical system. When a patient moves, or seeks care in another geographic area, clinicians likely face gaps if their health system doesn’t interact with those where the patient has received care in the past. Maybe a patient has seen multiple specialists, each requiring different labs or clinic visits, and each using their own EHR; the onus of requisitioning data sharing from each of these practitioners individually can present an array of additional hurdles and time-wasting.
Broadly, an SPR pulls in all of the patient’s data, from every different entity (and every data storage platform), delivering a complete and interoperable view.
Explaining the single-patient record vision
We see the SPR as resting on three interconnected, equally important pillars:
Patient Visibility
Patients should retain a complete view of their own health data, as well as the means to contribute to the record, to control who has access (and at what level), and to monitor who has viewed, augmented, or utilized that record. SPR is based on a foundation of patient control and empowerment.
Secure Data
The ideal SPR walks a tightrope of security and availability, keeping data completely safe and private while also enabling access for any specialists, clinics, or labs a patient might be served by, including clinical trials and research (with patient consent.)
Single Truth
Rather than siloed data that exists in many different systems’ portals, ultimately creating gaps and omissions in any provider’s understanding of that patient’s health history and current presentation, the SPR seeks to unify all of the patient’s data into one comprehensive record, spanning all of their disparate medical interactions over time.
When founded upon these three pillars, the SPR provides a transformational addition to the healthcare innovation ecosystem, yielding a host of benefits for patients, clinicians, and medical systems at large:
Better preventative care and population health management
Enhanced care coordination and patient outcomes
Data-driven resource planning and decision-making
The availability of a broad, comprehensive data view for many patients or even a population, in which information silos and disconnects are eliminated, facilitates these short- and long-term capabilities in diagnosis, care management, and prevention that are so far unprecedented in healthcare. Moreover, these underscore our NHS goals of interoperability between disparate systems, a personalized approach at the point-of-care, and streamlined, efficient workflows for hard-working clinicians.
Benefits of a single-patient record
There are an array of obvious and not-so-obvious benefits to leveraging SPRs:
Improved clinical decision-making
With quicker and more comprehensive access to patients’ data, doctors and other practitioners are equipped to make more accurate, data-driven choices in patient care, monitor dynamic health situations, and surface hidden risks or conditions that, absent this access to disparate data, might go undiscovered.
Patient safety and experience
Clinicians are better equipped to treat and prevent different conditions with better data access; they also can customize and personalize care, accounting for allergies, lifestyles, family responsibilities, and other outside considerations that are often omitted in traditional EHRs. This yields not only improved safety for patients, but a better experience of being seen and understood by clinicians.
Operational efficiency and reduced duplication:
Treatment and monitoring can be slowed down by both inaccessible, siloed data just as much as having to sift through an overflow of data that occurs repeatedly in multiple locations. A streamlined, comprehensive approach that pulls in data from many sources and resolves duplication improves clinician’s workflows and leads to more efficient and productive patient visits.
Research and policy insights
Broad, accurate, all-encompassing data from not only one patient, but a whole group or population, can lead to advances in medical research and important insights about treatments, protocols, and health policy itself; ultimately, these advancements can result in better health outcomes for millions of people.
Within the NHS, the SPR is a powerful tool for our aim of making healthcare more accessible and efficient, and improving service at the point of care. This benefits not only patients, but clinicians, administrators, and even tax-payers—everyone in the healthcare ecosystem.
Gain a single patient view with a trusted data foundation
Challenges of a single-patient record
Of course, creating such a comprehensive and robust framework is not without its difficulties. Healthcare data challenges must be worked through in order to make the SPR ideal a functional reality:
1. Fragmented data sources and legacy systems
Creating a unified data record from a variety of sources can be a challenge, particularly when some medical groups still rely on out-of-date legacy systems that pose obstacles to interoperability. Particularly if data needs to be removed manually from one system and integrated into another, these painstaking processes can gunk up the works.
2. Data quality and trust
Your SPR is only as good as its data foundation. Ensuring you're working with trusted, up-to-date, accurate data is imperative to creating a SPR that is useful to clinicians—giving them current, complete, and correct information—and impactful for patients as well.
3. Governance, privacy, and consent
With sensitive data, robust protocols must be in place for securing private information and ensuring that it is accessible only to individuals to whom the patients themselves have explicitly authorized access. Rigorous protections must be in place in order to keep data safe from evolving cyberthreats, and of course, SPR-linked platforms must comply with data protection regulations across whatever regions they serve.
4. Implementation at scale
Implementing a new solution across many integrated care systems (ICSs), along with all the NHS trusts (separate organizational units within NHS), involves reconciling many moving parts—each with different platforms and stakeholders; the sheer number of fragmented systems and information silos within them can create obstacles to a unified data view.
Learning lessons from the past
Of course, any discussion of the SPR must acknowledge errors of the past—in particular, the failed National Program for IT (NPfIT). The program failed for a number of reasons: Broadly, it was overly focused on technical specifications while ignoring the institutional arrangements needed to ensure meaning-making. The NPfiT suffered significant integration challenges that came not from message transport, but rather, from semantic inconsistency and disagreement about what its data meant.
Without accountability for semantic consistency, data flowed between systems but was semantically incompatible. This gave an appearance of integration but ultimately failed to provide interoperability in practice. (The problem was especially pronounced when considering the differences in health and social care terminologies and professional frameworks.)
It is important to note that NPfIT was a top-down initiative with political motivations; it incorporated little input from clinical and operational stakeholders. Consequently, NPfIT’s centralised procurement model failed to engage the clinical stakeholders who would have ultimately used the systems by neglecting the socio-cultural aspects of implementation. The result: Lack of buy-in and even resistance across the NHS.
The current SPR initiative risks must avoid replicating the NPfiT’s mistakes, pursuing a federated technical infrastructure without a federated governance infrastructure or collective cohesive activism. Semantic interoperability is mandatory—not “nice to have.” This will mean establishing metadata registries, data stewardship roles, and governance processes to resolve conflicts between different professional interpretations of clinical concepts. These investments should be prioritised along with technical infrastructure development, not treated as afterthoughts.
What’s next for the NHS and the single-patient record
Of course, the challenges involved underscore many of the reasons why it’s imperative to make the shift to a SPR. Today, the NHS operates under the vision and action plan “Data Saves Lives”—meaning that accessible, accurate, timely data can dramatically reshape health and social care.
The “Data Saves Lives” campaign can be distilled into these objectives:
The NHS works to build transparency around data use by collaborating on initiatives like the “data pact,” engaging patient and public advisory panels, and clearly communicating how information is collected and used.
Patients are being empowered to access and manage their own data, including test results and prescription records through tools like the NHS App and shared care records, in order to enhance their ability to self-manage and make informed healthcare choices.
Health and care information is being used to improve population health and service planning, enabling NHS systems to identify care trends, allocate resources effectively, and drive preventive healthcare strategies.
Secure, privacy-enhanced environments are being built to support medical research and innovation, with programmes like the NHS Research Secure Data Environment and NHS DigiTrials fostering ethical and impactful use of patient data to develop new treatments.
Data standardization, cloud migration, updated information-governance tools, and clear legal frameworks to protect patient confidentiality and facilitate interoperability must be in place.
A unified view of NHS patient data is central to all of these objectives, enabling the trust, accuracy, and accessibility of information—across all trusts and ICSs—that these undertakings demand; ultimately, a shift to SPRs will facilitate better health outcomes at both the patient and population levels. Of course, the 10 Year Health Plan will supersede this, but SPR will be front and center as a foundational enabler.
Key implementation considerations for a single-patient record
The NHS daily serves over a million patients, and some 57 million annually; it oversees a vast network of constituent organizations (labs, clinics, practices, specialists, and trusts), each with its own unique priorities, systems, and workflows. To implement an SPR across such an extensive ecosystem requires keeping these considerations-top-of mind:
1. Importance of entity resolution and context-rich data
Entity resolution (ER) is a process that identifies and merges records from multiple data sources that represent the same real-world entity, like a person, organization, or address. Contextually-enriched data helps organizations to incorporate and analyze the information, even from unstructured data sources, to create a timely, unified view that delivers valuable insights.
2. Scalability and extensibility of the solution
A SPR’s value is directly tied to its ability to scale and extend across each of these constituents in a system-agnostic manner. It must integrate and harmonize diverse data, in an array of different formats, from each organization and individual.
3. Building trust through transparency and governance
The SPR must facilitate transparency with patients, giving them autonomy over their medical information, control over the visibility of that data, and sharing capacity with clinicians, labs, or other relevant practitioners. Rigorous data protection protocols must also be in place to ensure compliance with government and regional data security and privacy regulations, as well as to facilitate trust among organizations and patients.
4. Driving adoption with clinician and patient engagement
The SPR is only as effective as it is utilized. Interaction with the SPR must be smooth, seamless, transparent and user-friendly, in order to encourage adoption and diminish churn. Patients must be empowered to engage with the SPR, and clinicians must be able to input and capture meaningful information from it—at the point of care and beyond.
How Quantexa enables a single-patient record
Quantexa’s platform delivers an array of core capabilities that support and elevate the SPR, taking it from rosy ideal to successfully implemented solution:
Entity resolution and data unification
Quantexa’s entity resolution (ER) and data unification capabilities power a robust single-patient record, by intelligently merging fragmented data from multiple sources into one coherent, 360° profile. Leveraging machine learning-driven ER, the Quantexa platform achieves up to 99% matching accuracy and automatically de-duplicates records in both real-time and batch processes. This unified view integrates clinical data with enriched demographic and social determinants, giving clinicians timely access to comprehensive patient histories, tests, labs, and other data. Ultimately, a trusted single-patient record enhances decision-making, supports targeted interventions, improves care coordination, and empowers population health management across healthcare ecosystems.
Relationship and network analytics
Quantexa’s relationship and network analytics take unified patient data a step further, by visualizing and analyzing how individuals connect—to households, care providers, social services, and broader demographic cohorts—within a graph framework. This graph-based view allows providers or care teams to quickly identify hidden risks or support needs, such as shared health conditions within a household or social determinants affecting a patient’s well-being. By dynamically generating and updating these networks in real time, the platform ensures that any emerging relationships—like new support interactions or referrals—are automatically reflected in the single patient record. As a result, clinicians gain a richer, context-aware profile that supports personalized interventions, improves care coordination across providers, and enhances population-level health planning.
Real-time decision intelligence
Quantexa’s real-time decision intelligence capabilities empower health systems such as the NHS by integrating unified patient records and network analytics into live operational workflows. As clinical or administrative systems ingest patient data, the Decision Intelligence platform dynamically applies real-time scoring and alerts, enabling immediate, context-rich interventions—such as flagging emerging risks or prompting timely follow-up actions. By combining entity resolution, graph-based relationship mapping, and AI-powered analytics, the system ensures each decision is made with the full, up-to-date patient context within a single, trusted record. This seamless integration accelerates responses, supports proactive care, and improves patient outcomes by ensuring no critical insight or relationship is overlooked as patient data evolves.
Consider the following situation: A patient visits their GP exhibiting early signs of chronic lung disease, and the NHS systems instantly record this diagnosis into a single-patient record, powered by Quantexa’s entity-resolution technology—collating lab results, treatment history, environmental and social factors. As the patient's condition evolves, real-time network analytics flag rising risk patterns—like similar cases in the same household, or other cases in the patient’s residential area—and prompt a nurse to schedule a follow-up before symptoms worsen, as well as health workers to make contact with other potentially impacted individuals in the same area.
Throughout the process, Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence layer dynamically scores the patient’s risk, and alerts the care team through their EHR system, enabling them to prescribe early interventions and connect with community support. Over time, that same record updates across primary care, specialist referrals, and community services, giving clinicians full visibility into the patient’s journey—as well as similar patient journeys, from other impacted individuals in the area—and, in the longer term, dramatically reducing both hospitalizations and unnecessary tests.
NHS, Quantexa, and the vision of the single-patient record
Quantexa delivers an interoperable, NHS-aligned solution by supporting a trusted single-patient record that spans thousands of care systems, seamlessly connecting primary, community, acute, and social care data into a secure, unified foundation. Our platform supports real-time Decision Intelligence, helping clinicians access comprehensive, context-rich patient information at the point of care—fully aligned with NHS’s goal to enable faster, safer, and more informed decisions as part of the "Data Saves Lives" strategy.
Our commitment to interoperability dovetails with NHS’s ambition to empower clinicians and patients, all while maintaining privacy, transparency, and trust. Quantexa’s solution strengthens NHS data infrastructure by delivering linked, actionable insights that support proactive, patient-centered care. Ultimately, the partnership between Quantexa and NHS is about making data not only accessible, but usable and life-saving, across the healthcare continuum.
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