Case Study: The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust achieves modern, resilient interoperability and faster patient data access with InterSystems Ensemble

How InterSystems makes overhauling key systems easy

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, serving over 820,000 people across Bury, Rochdale, North Manchester and Oldham with an operating budget of more than £500m, faced major interoperability and reliability problems: its ageing Trust Integration Engine and a 20+ year‑old PAS lacked full HL7 support, ran near capacity with no automatic failover, and could take up to eight hours to recover—limiting efficient information flow and timely patient care.

The Trust deployed InterSystems Ensemble with a phased migration, on‑site training and Spine Mini Services for real‑time demographic lookups to replicate, enrich and replace interfaces. In seven months they developed, tested and migrated 130 interfaces across 32 systems, cut maintenance from ~4 hours/day to under 30 minutes, all but eliminated callouts, added proactive monitoring and improved patient identification—resulting in a modern, resilient, future‑proof integration platform.

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust

Paula Martin

Trust Project Manager for the Integration/Migration