[Case Study] How Integrella Helped Hywel Dda Modernise the Systems Behind Patient Care

Keeping Patient Data Moving – Safely and Seamlessly

Overview

Hywel Dda University Health Board provides acute, community and primary care services across West Wales, supporting almost 400,000 people. As part of its digital transformation strategy, the Health Board needed to replace its ageing integration platform with a modern, secure and scalable solution that would improve interoperability without disrupting frontline clinical services.

Integrella partnered with Hywel Dda to design and deliver a future-ready Trust Integration Engine (TIE), enabling the safe, real-time flow of patient data across hospital systems while laying the foundations for future NHS Wales interoperability.

The Challenge

Hywel Dda’s existing integration platform had reached end of support and was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. It lacked the flexibility to support modern interoperability standards such as HL7, FHIR and APIs, offered limited visibility into interface performance, and required significant manual effort to manage.

The Health Board needed more than a platform replacement. It required a trusted partner to define the right architecture, select the most suitable integration technology, and deliver a low-risk migration that maintained continuous clinical services.

Key challenges included:

• Replacing unsupported legacy technology with no disruption to patient care
• Improving monitoring and visibility across integration interfaces
• Reducing operational risk and manual maintenance
• Supporting growing message volumes and future digital transformation
• Enabling a scalable platform ready for modern interoperability standards

The Solution

Integrella worked closely with Hywel Dda to shape the programme from strategy through to delivery.

Following collaborative discovery workshops, Integrella recommended the Health Board select Rhapsody as its new Trust Integration Engine and developed a phased migration approach that ensured zero clinical downtime.

The new integration platform enables patient information such as admissions, discharges, referrals and demographics to flow securely and reliably between clinical systems in real time.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Designing and implementing a modern Trust Integration Engine (TIE)
• AI-assisted migration techniques to accelerate conversion from the legacy platform
• Secure, standards-based integration using HL7 with readiness for FHIR and APIs
• Real-time monitoring, dashboards and automated alerts for improved operational visibility
• Dedicated development, testing and live environments to support safe deployment and governance
• Comprehensive documentation, knowledge transfer and training to enable internal teams to manage the platform confidently

Outcomes

Integrella successfully modernised Hywel Dda’s integration capability while ensuring uninterrupted clinical services throughout the migration.

Key outcomes included:

• Zero clinical downtime during migration
• 80% faster development cycles through AI-assisted code conversion and automated validation
• 80% reduction in issue detection and resolution time with real-time monitoring and alerting
• 70% reduction in regression testing effort through automated testing and message comparison
• 30% reduction in external dependency, enabling internal teams to manage integrations independently
• 100+ interfaces and thousands of daily messages now monitored in real time
• A secure, resilient integration platform ready to support future interoperability across NHS Wales

By combining deep NHS integration expertise with AI-enabled engineering, Integrella helped Hywel Dda replace a critical legacy platform with a modern, scalable integration foundation that improves operational resilience today while supporting future digital transformation.