Professor Jacqui Cooper and Cara Afzal from Health Innovation Manchester attended the Integrated Care Delivery Forum 2026, contributors on a panel session, ‘Connectivity for neighbourhood coordination’. The panel included Jane Johnston, CEO at AphA, and was chaired by Melanie Williams, Executive Director of the Peoples Services.

They anchored the discussion in the Greater Manchester Shared Care Record (GMCR), but the discussion wasn’t a story about a single system. It was about some the challenges and how essential it is to turn data into something that genuinely improves care.

Cara highlighted the architecture in Greater Manchester: the shared care records, EPRs and secure data environments. Sharing that the foundations are built, and in Greater Manchester they are relatively mature. The conversation moved beyond infrastructure, with Cara highlighting that having the tools isn’t the same as using them. One of the most striking themes was the sheer effort still required just to drive awareness and adoption. Going out to frontline clinicians. Having conversations. Explaining what’s already available. Encouraging people to use systems they technically already have access to, requires effort. With usage of the GMCR increasing year on year.

Jacqui highlighted that even in a system as advanced as Greater Manchester, usage is still a choice made moment by moment. She shared an example of a clinician choosing not to access the shared care record because it was “two clicks away.” Highlighting that it’s easy to dismiss that, but actually, it says everything about where we are, adoption doesn’t fail because people disagree with the vision. It fails because, in the reality of a busy clinical environment, things need to be immediate, intuitive, and valuable. Otherwise, they simply don’t happen.

There were questions from the audience about the data, which is rich, but not always reliable.  With one panel member highlighting that in many ways, we are data rich, but quality can be poor. Not because people don’t care, but because the systems, standards, and processes around data haven’t kept pace with the ambition for how it should be used. With different parts of the system still defining the same things in different ways. Acute care, primary care, community services – all working to slightly different models, different terminology, different priorities. When you try to bring that together into a single view, those inconsistencies don’t disappear.

Cara highlighted that Greater Manchester is becoming much better at generating insight via dashboards, analytics, population health views, but insight alone doesn’t change outcomes. What matters is whether those insights are actionable, and whether they are actually acted upon. Sharing that GM has strong data assets that are allowing access to data for research as well as direct care. She expanded on where frontline care is beginning to be positively impacted in the areas of Care planning in Greater Manchester; which is one of the clearest examples of progress. By focusing less on what systems can technically do, and more on what clinicians and patients actually need, something meaningful has started to shift in GM. End‑of‑life care planning in particular is beginning to deliver measurable change, with preferred place of death increasing significantly.

Behind that these stats is something far more important: people being supported to experience care in the way they would choose. That’s when digital stops being a programme and starts being something that genuinely matters.

Jacqui talked about data quality remains everyone’s responsibility, but that’s easy to say and much harder to operationalise. Coding is inconsistent. Systems don’t always make it easy to capture the right information in the right way. Cara shared that while AI is being positioned as the solution, the reality is more nuanced. AI applied to poor‑quality data doesn’t solve the problem. There is real potential, particularly in areas like data cleansing and pattern recognition. But the fundamentals still matter – good data in, human oversight, and clear standards.

Jacqui took a question from the audience about patients access and talked about patients gaining more access to their own records, and how they are starting to see what we see. And sometimes, what they see isn’t right. That creates challenge, but also opportunity. Because it reframes something fundamental: “this isn’t our data as a system. It’s their data as citizens. And when people feel ownership, expectations change. Accountability increases. The conversation becomes more transparent.”

Of course, that also brings questions about trust, security, and responsibility, especially in a landscape where suppliers, systems, and national programmes all intersect. These are not easy questions. But they are the right ones to be asking.

The main takeaways from the session for Cara – we know what good looks like, but what we are working through now is the reality of delivery:

•             making data usable

•             making systems intuitive

•             building trust in what we present

•             and, most importantly, supporting people to actually use the systems built

Jacqui, coming from a clinical perspective shared her takeaways – connectivity only has value if it changes something for the person in front of us and that only happens when it becomes part of everyday practice, not an additional step or optional extra, but simply “how we do things here.” That’s the shift we’re still making. And conversations like these are a really important part of getting us there, all in all it was a great session, with lots of learning and takeaways.