Buyer guide · UK healthcare
A hospital buyer’s guide to healthcare integration
Compare potential integration partners against your hospital’s systems, clinical workflows, safety responsibilities, and long-term support needs. Use these questions to find out how a supplier will work with your teams and what evidence you can review before agreeing scope.
01 · Message exchange
Ask specific questions about HL7 v2
“We support HL7” does not explain how an interface will behave in your environment. Ask the partner to walk through the message scope and the operational details for the workflows you need to connect.
- Which message types, triggers, identifiers, and optional fields are in scope?
- How are acknowledgements, rejected messages, retries, and manual recovery handled?
- Who owns each mapping, and how are mapping changes reviewed and recorded?
- Can the proposed approach be shown with representative and edge-case scenarios?
Explore the HL7 v2 and FHIR integration service and try the sample message validator with non-production examples.
02 · APIs and resources
Define what FHIR support means for your workflow
FHIR is a starting point for a technical conversation, not a complete delivery specification. Establish the capabilities your users and connected systems actually need, then ask how the partner will test them.
- Resources and profiles: Which resources and implementation profiles are needed, and how will local requirements be handled?
- Version and workflow: Which versions and read or write interactions are expected for each use case?
- API behaviour: What are the expectations for authentication, search, errors, paging, and changes to the interface?
Compare the questions with the integration service overview and the healthcare integration glossary.
03 · Integration layer
Understand the interface engine and its ownership
The engine is part of the operating model as well as the technical design. Ask how the partner will fit the routing and transformation layer into your current estate, and how your team will see what is happening after handover.
- How are routes, transformations, and dependencies documented?
- What monitoring, alerting, and message investigation will be available to your team?
- Who responds to failures and owns recovery across supplier and hospital teams?
- How will new systems or workflow changes be assessed and introduced?
See the wider healthcare integration services and ask how the proposed engine design fits your existing estate.
04 · Evidence in context
Follow the full data flow in testing
Ask for a test approach that checks the complete path from the source system, through the integration layer, to the receiving system and the person using the information. Testing should make both normal and failure behaviour visible.
- Use representative messages, including agreed edge cases and missing data.
- Check the received information against the source and expected mapping.
- Exercise rejected messages, recovery paths, retries, and reconciliation.
- Ask clinical and operational users to confirm that the resulting workflow is usable.
Use the integration readiness checklist to prepare questions, and review the sample message validator for a limited message-level check.
05 · Safety responsibilities
Align clinical safety responsibilities early
Involve your clinical safety leads when defining the workflow and supplier responsibilities. Agree how safety concerns will be raised and evidenced within your organisation’s governance before delivery decisions are made.
- Who identifies hazards related to the interface and its use in context?
- What evidence, review points, and records will each party provide?
- How are supplier responsibilities separated from local clinical ownership?
- Who approves changes and reviews safety concerns after go-live?
The clinical safety alignment page offers further prompts for a discussion with your local leads.
06 · Delivery and support
Make delivery support and handover concrete
Clarify how work moves from discovery through deployment and into routine operation. Ask who makes decisions, what your team needs to provide, and how unresolved issues will be handled at each stage.
- Who coordinates implementation, dependencies, environments, and deployment planning?
- What support is planned around go-live, and how are issues escalated?
- What monitoring, runbooks, and technical handover will be provided?
- Who maintains mappings and interfaces when connected systems change?
Review the services overview and published case studies as context for a conversation about your own requirements.
Bring the answers together
Compare evidence, ownership, and fit
For each partner, record the answer, the evidence you reviewed, the person who owns the next decision, and any open question. That makes differences in scope and operating approach easier to discuss with technical, clinical, and procurement colleagues.
- Does the proposed scope match the systems and workflow?
- Can the team explain normal behaviour and failure recovery?
- Are testing evidence and clinical safety responsibilities clear?
- Is delivery ownership clear through handover and future change?
Plan your next conversation
Bring your integration questions to Senysolutions
Share the systems, workflows, and decisions you are working through. The enquiry form is the place to start a conversation about your hospital integration needs.