Joining up health and social care: what we learned prototyping the Social Care Interoperability Platform
Synanetics worked alongside Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England to explore one of the hardest problems in digital care: how information can move between adult social care and health. We look back at the journey from user research to a working prototype, and what we learned along the way.
When someone moves from a care home to hospital and back again, their information should travel with them. Too often in adult social care, it doesn’t.
The sector has made great progress in going digital, but digitising individual organisations is only part of the challenge. For people moving between health and social care, the question is not whether their information is digital. It is whether the right information can follow them to the professionals who need it.
That question sits at the heart of the Social Care Interoperability Platform (SCIP). Synanetics was commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to support the joint DHSC and NHS England Digitising Social Care programme in exploring how information could be better shared between adult social care and health.
The engagement ran as a test-and-learn programme. Rather than building a finished system, the work explored the problem with the sector and used prototypes to test the riskiest assumptions: from Discovery and user research, through a Proof of Concept, to an appraisal of options for Alpha.
TL;DR
🔗 Health and social care information remains fragmented, even as digital adoption grows.
🧩 SCIP tested a standards-based interoperability model using MODS and FHIR.
🔄 The prototype successfully demonstrated NHS number matching, record transfers and supplier switching.
🚀 Six assured DSCR suppliers integrated with the platform during a hands-on Hack Day.
📋 Full auditability and traceability were built into every information exchange.
🤝 Governance, collaboration and adoption proved just as important as technology.
🧠 The work also explored foundations for safe AI, built on governed, standards-based data.
🎯 The goal was simple: help a person’s information follow them across health and social care.
Starting with the problem, not the technology
SCIP wasn’t a technology looking for a use case. Discovery began by asking what actually happens when information needs to cross the boundary between adult social care and health.
The health and social care interoperability landscape is highly distributed. The public SCIP roadmap describes information about people receiving care as scattered across many systems and locations, with individual connections often built and maintained in non-standard ways. The results are fragmented records, duplication, slower decisions, and extra administrative work.
It’s also worth saying what SCIP is not. It was never intended to be another care record system or a national social care database. It is designed to complement Digital Social Care Records (DSCRs), not replace them. The focus is on the connections between systems.
Synanetics worked alongside the national programme on user research, technical investigation, information governance and analysis of the existing landscape, following the GDS Service Standard. Between September 2025 and March 2026, the research team carried out over 60 interviews across three Discovery cycles.
Crucially, the research wasn’t limited to technologists. It began with adult social care providers and DSCR suppliers, then widened to health professionals involved in admissions, discharge and transfers of care, including GPs, registered nurses, hospital staff, trusted assessors, paramedics and ambulance staff. That kept the work grounded in real services and real workflows, not just APIs and data standards.
Five themes came up again and again:
- Providers work in digital silos, despite the growing use of Digital Social Care Records.
- Care workers lack critical information as people move across care pathways.
- Transferring records between providers is difficult and inconsistent.
- Connections between social care systems and NHS services are limited.
- Social care information is often unavailable when clinical decisions are made.
The most striking finding was what people didn’t say. Nobody doubted that interoperability was possible. The real question was how to deliver it consistently, and at scale across a very diverse sector.
What we prototyped: a translator in the middle
Social care and health describe information in different ways. Social care information is structured using the Minimum Operational Data Standard (MODS). NHS services exchange information using FHIR, the international standard for health data APIs, with UK and NHS-specific profiles.
Neither side should have to change how it works. So rather than asking every care record supplier to build its own connection to every NHS service, the Proof of Concept tested a different idea: one shared, standards-based layer in the middle that everyone connects to once.
We set out to test a few principles. Build once and use many times. Use the standards the sector already has rather than inventing new ones. Keep information in the systems that hold it, sharing it when there is a need rather than copying it into a central store. And make every exchange traceable.
What the Proof of Concept showed
The Proof of Concept allowed us to test ideas in working code rather than on architecture diagrams. Through a series of end-to-end demonstrations, we tested three everyday journeys, and each worked in a prototype setting:
- Finding a person’s NHS number, the common key that links health and social care records.
- Transferring a record between care providers when someone changes care setting.
- Switching supplier, so a provider can change care record system and keep its structured records.
In the demonstrations, each exchange carried a full audit trail, so information could be tracked across organisational boundaries. They also showed NHS services reusing social care information.
Testing with the people who would implement it: the SCIP Hack Day
One of the most valuable moments came when the prototype was put in the hands of the organisations that would ultimately have to integrate with it.
In May 2026, Digitising Social Care hosted the SCIP Hack Day at NHS England’s offices. Six assured Digital Social Care Record suppliers worked against the prototype federated integration platform, using synthetic data to exercise real end-to-end flows. Teams published, retrieved and consumed data end to end, and some went beyond the flows originally planned. By the end of the first day, suppliers were reading and writing “About Me” and person support profile data, both part of MODS.
Jamie Hibbard, CTO of care record supplier Nourish, wrote about the day. His account echoes what we heard in Discovery: maintaining separate connections to every shared care record is slow and expensive, and harder still for smaller providers. He made two points that stayed with us:
- Connect once. A single, standards-based point of connection would let providers of any size take part through their existing workflows.
- Information should flow both ways. In his words, social care “cannot just be a passive recipient of NHS data.” Providers record rich information every day, close to the person, and it needs a route back into the wider system.
The Hack Day also exposed the harder questions, including data ownership, consistency and de-duplication. It reinforced a lesson familiar from interoperability work across health and care: the technology is only one part of the solution.
What we learned
Several lessons from SCIP apply well beyond adult social care.
Start with people and services
Standards matter, but they need to solve recognisable problems. The project started by understanding where information was missing, duplicated or hard to reach, and how that affected people working across health and care. Only then did the team move on to testing technology.
Standards are a foundation, not the finished solution
The Alpha appraisal concluded that many of the capabilities the sector needs already exist, but they are fragmented across systems, platforms and regions. MODS and FHIR gave the prototype a common basis for exchange, and the Hack Day showed suppliers could work with that approach. But shared standards don’t automatically settle questions of data quality, ownership, identity, governance or operating models.
Test with the organisations that will implement it
At the Hack Day, suppliers didn’t just watch a demonstration. They integrated their own systems with the prototype and ran the flows themselves. That kind of hands-on testing exposes assumptions that are hard to see in an architecture document.
Small pieces of information can matter a lot
Not every problem needs a whole record to move. Our technical work suggested that simple, timely administrative information, such as where a person is or who to contact, could improve existing processes. Future work should be driven by the information flows people find useful, not by how much data technology makes it possible to exchange.
Collaboration is part of the architecture
Synanetics didn’t develop a solution in isolation and hand over a finished product to the Centre. The work was a multidisciplinary programme with DHSC, NHS England and the wider Digitising Social Care community, combining programme leadership with product, research, design and engineering specialists. That way of working shaped the evidence as much as any piece of technology.
A foundation for safe AI
There is a lot of interest in what AI could do for social care. Our view is that it depends on the plumbing: AI is only as useful, and as safe, as the information it can reach.
As part of the programme, we sketched example architectures for how AI could work alongside SCIP. They rest on a few deliberate choices. AI retrieves information from governed, standards-based data, using predefined and auditable patterns. It describes and summarises, but does not diagnose, predict or generate clinical facts. And professional judgement stays at the centre of every decision. Used this way, AI could help people spot patterns in care records and find what they need faster, supporting the people doing the work rather than replacing their judgement.
From Discovery towards Alpha
By July 2026, the programme had moved through Discovery and Proof of Concept into detailed consideration of the options for an Alpha. That included a technical options appraisal, further work with DSCR suppliers to test integration through the MODS Adapter, information governance support and continued demonstrations.
It’s worth being clear about what this stage means. The prototypes were made to answer questions, not to become a live service. Any move towards a real service would be a separate step, with its own design and build, clinical safety assurance, information governance and onboarding of care record suppliers at scale. Those steps take time, and they matter: they are how a promising prototype becomes something people can rely on.
Information that follows the person
For Synanetics, SCIP shows what good interoperability work looks like. It takes more than integration software. It means understanding users and workflows, working openly with suppliers and national teams, using standards pragmatically, building just enough technology to test assumptions, and being ready for evidence to challenge the original design.
The Discovery and Proof of Concept didn’t make the complexity disappear. They did something more useful: they turned assumptions into evidence, ideas into working data flows, and a national ambition into something suppliers and practitioners could begin to test.
All of it points to a simple idea: a person’s information should follow them across health and social care. We’re proud to have contributed to this work, and grateful to everyone across the sector who gave their time and insight along the way.
