Written by Technical Team | Last updated 01.08.2025 | 8 minute read
For digital health innovators, securing adoption within the NHS involves more than developing an effective solution. Increasingly, NHS Trusts expect new technologies to integrate seamlessly with their existing digital ecosystems. A central part of this ecosystem is often the Trust Integration Engine (TIE), which manages the flow of data between different systems. One of the most widely used TIEs across NHS Trusts is InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect. Understanding how to integrate with this platform is essential for innovators who want their products to gain traction and deliver value in real-world NHS environments.
HealthShare Health Connect is an interoperability engine built by InterSystems to support the secure and efficient exchange of health information. It plays a critical role within NHS Trusts by acting as the central hub through which disparate systems communicate. Whether a Trust needs to send clinical data from an electronic patient record (EPR) system to a pathology service, receive imaging data from a radiology system, or share records with community and social care partners, Health Connect provides the underlying infrastructure to make that possible.
For digital health innovators, this means that Health Connect is likely to be the primary gateway through which your product exchanges information with existing NHS systems. Rather than building numerous direct integrations, innovators can focus on creating one connection that allows their solution to interact with the wider Trust ecosystem via the TIE.
NHS Trusts manage complex digital environments made up of multiple clinical systems, each designed for specific purposes such as patient administration, laboratory management, radiology, and electronic prescribing. Without a TIE, these systems risk existing as silos, with clinicians forced to duplicate data entry or manually reconcile information. A TIE such as Health Connect avoids this by handling the routing, transformation, and delivery of data between systems in real time.
From the perspective of an innovator, this means that your product does not need to individually connect with every clinical system in the Trust. Instead, once you are integrated with the TIE, your solution can securely receive and send the information it needs, subject to governance and configuration agreed with the Trust. This efficiency is one of the primary reasons NHS Trusts invest in solutions like Health Connect.
One of Health Connect’s strengths is its comprehensive support for healthcare data standards. This is particularly important in the NHS, where interoperability is underpinned by standards set by NHS England and other bodies.
For innovators, the most common standards you may need to work with include HL7 v2 messaging, which remains the backbone of many existing NHS integrations, and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), which is rapidly growing in adoption, particularly for modern APIs. Health Connect supports both HL7 v2 and FHIR, along with HL7 v3, CDA, DICOM for imaging, and X12 for administrative data. This breadth ensures that no matter what systems a Trust uses, the TIE can act as the mediator.
Understanding which standards your prospective Trust partner uses, and being able to demonstrate compliance with those standards, will make your integration journey smoother. For example, a digital outpatient monitoring solution may need to consume demographic and appointment data from a Trust’s patient administration system (often delivered via HL7 v2) while also exposing a FHIR-based API that allows clinicians to view monitoring results directly in the EPR.
Integrating with Health Connect typically follows one of two main approaches, depending on the needs of the Trust and the capabilities of your product. The first approach is message-based integration, where your product exchanges HL7 or similar structured messages with Health Connect. In this model, the TIE routes and, if necessary, transforms messages to and from other Trust systems. The second approach is API-based integration, often using FHIR, where Health Connect acts as a broker for modern, web-based data exchanges.
In many cases, both approaches may be combined. For instance, your product might consume real-time HL7 admission, discharge, and transfer messages from Health Connect to understand when a patient has entered the hospital, while simultaneously exposing a FHIR API through which clinicians can retrieve patient-specific insights. Health Connect’s flexibility means it can accommodate hybrid integration models, ensuring you can deliver the functionality the Trust requires without compromising on interoperability.
Within Health Connect, integrations are built around configurable components known as business services, processes, and operations. Business services handle the receipt of data from external systems, processes manage the business logic and routing, and operations deliver data to target systems. For innovators, this means your product will often be represented as a business service, operation, or both, depending on whether you are primarily consuming or supplying data.
While Trust integration teams usually configure these components within Health Connect, innovators benefit from understanding the architecture. This knowledge allows you to have more informed discussions with the Trust’s technical teams, anticipate how your solution will be represented within their TIE, and ensure you supply the right technical documentation and test artefacts to support a successful implementation.
Integration with NHS systems is not just about technical connectivity; it is also about meeting strict requirements for information governance and cyber security. Health Connect provides robust support for TLS encryption, role-based access controls, auditing, and monitoring, all of which help ensure compliance with NHS Digital standards and the Data Security and Protection Toolkit.
For innovators, this means you will need to ensure your solution supports secure data exchange, whether through encrypted messaging, secure APIs, or token-based authentication. You may also need to demonstrate how your product integrates with Health Connect without compromising security or patient confidentiality. Trusts are under increasing scrutiny to safeguard patient data, and being able to show how your integration respects these standards will position your product as a safer and more attractive option.
In a busy hospital environment, delays or failures in data exchange can have serious consequences for patient care. Health Connect includes tools such as monitoring dashboards, alerting systems, and performance metrics to ensure that integrations remain reliable. Trust integration teams rely on these tools to identify issues quickly and maintain system stability.
As an innovator, you should be prepared to discuss how your solution can scale to handle the data volumes expected in the NHS, how it manages errors, and how it supports resilience. Demonstrating that your integration can cope with high demand while maintaining accuracy and timeliness will reassure Trusts that your product is ready for deployment in mission-critical environments.
Every NHS Trust will have an integration team responsible for configuring and maintaining Health Connect. These teams act as the bridge between your product and the Trust’s existing systems. Building a strong relationship with them is key to a successful integration. This involves providing clear technical documentation, being responsive to queries, and offering test scenarios that allow the team to validate your solution before go-live.
It is also important to recognise that Trust integration teams often work under significant pressure, with limited resources and competing priorities. Demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to align with their processes will not only smooth the integration path but also strengthen your reputation as a collaborative partner.
For digital health innovators, the journey to integrating with Health Connect begins well before any technical work. It involves early engagement with Trust stakeholders to understand their requirements, standards, and workflows. You should be prepared to carry out a technical discovery phase where the scope of integration is defined, including the message types, APIs, and data flows required.
It is also worth investing time in understanding how Health Connect is deployed at the Trust in question. While the platform is broadly consistent across sites, each Trust will configure it differently based on their system landscape and clinical priorities. Being able to adapt to local configurations will make your product more versatile and easier to adopt across multiple Trusts.
Far from being a barrier, the presence of Health Connect at an NHS Trust can represent a significant opportunity for innovators. By reducing the need for complex, system-specific integrations, it lowers the barrier to entry and accelerates deployment. Moreover, Health Connect’s support for modern standards such as FHIR means that your product can contribute to the NHS’s broader goal of building interoperable, patient-centred care pathways.
For innovators aiming to scale, this can be particularly advantageous. Once you have demonstrated successful integration with Health Connect at one Trust, it becomes much easier to replicate that integration at other sites using the same TIE. In this way, Health Connect not only facilitates technical integration but also supports the scalability and sustainability of your product within the NHS.
Integrating with InterSystems HealthShare Health Connect is a critical step for digital health innovators seeking to deploy their solutions within NHS Trusts. As one of the leading TIE platforms in the NHS, it provides the infrastructure to connect new digital tools into the complex web of existing clinical systems, ensuring that data flows securely, reliably, and in line with established standards. For innovators, understanding how Health Connect operates, what standards it supports, and how to work effectively with Trust integration teams is key to turning promising technology into a solution that delivers real-world impact for patients and clinicians. By embracing Health Connect as a partner in interoperability, innovators can accelerate their journey into the NHS and contribute meaningfully to the future of integrated healthcare.
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