Transforming Patient Outcomes in Wales: A Collaborative Step Toward NHS Wales’ Digital Future

Across Wales and the wider NHS, healthcare teams are working hard to meet growing demand while continuing to deliver safe, high-quality care. To better support patients and clinicians, there is a growing focus on capturing meaningful patient-reported outcomes, including insights that reveal how people feel and function before and after treatment.

With an ageing population, rising numbers of patients with complex conditions, and increasing expectations for personalised services, the system is evolving to become more data-driven, connected, and patient-focussed.

At Promptly Health, we believe meaningful change in healthcare begins with better data, and that the best results come through close collaboration. Since January 2024, we’ve had the privilege of working alongside NHS Wales on a bold, forward-looking initiative designed to improve how patient-reported outcomes are collected and integrated into care. This national programme makes it easier for patients to share their experiences, giving clinical teams real-time insights to support better decisions, more personalised care, and meaningful service improvements across the country.

Spanning five of Wales’ seven Health Boards and one NHS Trust, this partnership is all about empowering patients and frontline teams with timely, actionable insights. But this isn’t just about systems -it’s about supporting the work NHS Wales is already leading to make A Healthier Wales a reality.

Bridging the gaps in patient data

Before this project began, NHS Wales had already made significant strides in deploying digital tools across its services. However, the collection and use of different assessments varied widely between organisations. These included:

• Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs), which are surveys where patients share their health status and quality of life.
• Patient Reported Experience Measures (PREMs), which capture patients’ feedback on their care experience.
• Clinician Reported Outcome Measures (CROMs), clinical assessments recorded by healthcare professionals, varied widely between organisations.

This variation made it harder to share learnings across regions, benchmark care, or scale innovations nationally.

Our role has been to complement the digital foundations already in place — supporting NHS Wales teams in standardising and scaling the use of outcomes data, following strict privacy and security processes, without losing the nuance of local practice.

Our role: building a cohesive, scalable solution

As a supplier on the NHS Wales digital framework, we’ve contributed technical capabilities to support a consistent, secure, and clinically meaningful approach to outcomes measurement.

Key elements include:

• Implementing the Patient and Service Outcome Management (PSOM) framework aligned with NHS Wales standards and the HL7 FHIR model, enabling seamless data interoperability and ensuring that patient outcomes are captured in a way that supports clinical decision-making across the entire health system.
• Integrating with National infrastructure NHS Wales National Data Resource (NDR) to ensure secure, interoperable data exchange, which means data can flow safely between services, reducing duplication and enabling a holistic view of patient health.
• Standardising outcome collection workflows across hospitals and services, providing clearer visibility into what matters most to patients and creating a foundation for consistent, comparable insights that can drive service improvements.
• Equipping clinical teams with tools like real-time insights and Red-Amber-Green dashboards that flag when patients may need extra support, empowering care teams to respond proactively and personalise treatment, ultimately improving patient outcomes and experience.

Thanks to our collaboration and the leadership of NHS Wales teams, 70 services have already been onboarded across five Health Boards - from oncology to chronic disease care - covering over 2.4 million people and collecting more than 185,000 outcome questionnaires to date.

Since early June 2025, we have onboarded a total of 76,066 patients across all Health Boards.

More than metrics: impacting real patient care

What’s most inspiring isn’t the technology,  it’s about how fast NHS Wales teams are embracing and using it to improve care. One Health Board has collected over 30,000 PROMs in a single speciality, actively using patient input to shape care decisions. Another has integrated outcome data into routine workflows, enabling clinicians and patients to track progress together.

CROMs are now being captured as well, giving care teams a more complete view of patient progress, all within a secure, shared system that respects both privacy and clinical nuance.

Lessons learned: data that drives action

This partnership reinforces that digital transformation succeeds when it respects the realities of frontline care. Some of the key lessons include:

• Standardisation must support local ownership - frameworks work best when tailored collaboratively with those delivering care.
• Trust and engagement are everything - the most sustainable systems are those that clinical teams want to use.
• Privacy must be built-in, not bolted on - through Promptly Health’s Secure Data Environments, NHS Wales retains secured full control of data, always within its digital boundaries.

What’s next

Together with NHS Wales, we’re continuing to expand service coverage, co-develop advanced analytics, and build on the strong foundations already in place. By the end of 2025, the goal is to support over 200 services across all participating Health Boards and NHS Trusts.

This work is a testament to what can be achieved when healthcare systems and digital partners align behind a shared mission: delivering better care through better data, with patients at the centre.

If your organisation is exploring how to integrate outcomes data in a way that respects privacy and drives impact, we’d be happy to share more about this journey  and what we’ve learned along the way. Learn more about our work in Wales on our website.

About the Author

Pedro Ramos, CEO at Promptly Health, a company dedicated to advancing patient-centred, privacy-preserving real-world evidence through scalable digital solutions.