Freedom of Information data has revealed that NHS England and five of the UK's largest hospital trusts logged 274,620 IT incidents throughout 2025 — disruption that led to cancelled operations and missed appointments. As the government pushes to make the NHS one of the most AI-enabled health systems in the world, Dynatrace Public Sector Director Paula Lender-Swain explains why digital visibility and resilience must be the foundation of that transformation.
The Foundations AI Transformation Needs First
As a priority, the NHS must close foundational gaps in visibility and resilience. Without a clear, real-time understanding of system performance and patient impact, healthcare organisations risk operating with dangerous blind spots.
Decades of legacy technology and fragmented data systems compound the problem. Connecting outdated platforms to modern, cloud-native applications while ensuring interoperability across trusts and partners will be one of the most complex parts of the digital transition.
The next phase of digital healthcare needs infrastructure built to support AI-driven innovation at scale. By strengthening observability and unifying data across systems, the NHS can shift from reacting to incidents to proactively managing them.
A System-Wide Problem, Not Isolated Incidents
The FOI data makes clear that NHS IT outages are a widespread issue, not confined to individual trusts or one-off events. Outages occur across multiple regions at scale, with thousands of patient interactions affected every time an incident occurs.
With digital disruption now a system-wide challenge, IT outages can no longer be treated as a purely technical issue — they have a direct, measurable impact on patients' ability to access care when and where they need it. Routine services like appointments are hit hardest, threatening early diagnosis and preventative treatment.
Inconsistent incident reporting across trusts also means the NHS lacks a joined-up picture of how outages affect patient care and clinician time — suggesting the true scale of disruption is likely greater than currently reported.
"AI-powered observability can detect anomalies and performance issues in real time, automatically pinpointing the source of disruption and often resolving it before patients are affected."— PAULA LENDER-SWAIN, PUBLIC SECTOR DIRECTOR, DYNATRACE
Why Interoperability Is Now Mission Critical
With patient data on the line, interoperability across trusts and partners is becoming mission critical to the success of the NHS's digital transition. Public trust must remain front and centre throughout.
It isn't enough for NHS systems to simply connect — they must be consistently secure and resilient so patients can be confident their data is accessed appropriately and used transparently. This is as much an organisational challenge as a technical one, requiring coordination across NHS trusts, local authorities and technology providers.