Patient Data Manager (PDM)

PDM is a secure, central platform for storing and sharing clinical patient data. It will replace the Spine clinical data store and aims to help NHSE product teams build services that improve direct care by making real-time, standardised health information easier to access.  
 
PDM supports FHIR standards, so it can work with a wide range of healthcare systems and it follows the Records management code of practice, ensuring patient data is always managed safely, fairly, and legally.  
 
We've built a ready-made, compliant platform that forms part of a portfolio of Spine data products that handle: data storage, interoperability, security, auditing and access control so that you can focus on creating better experiences for patients. 

Our platform supports you to deliver better products, faster by providing: 

• Secure data storage 
  Store structured patient data - like clinical observations, risk assessments, and questionnaire results - securely and consistently. View our supported data types. 
• Real-time data sharing 
  Use PDM’s FHIR R4-APIM API to exchange data across services instantly and reliably. Multicast Notification Service (MNS) lets you subscribe to notifications when data changes. 
• Auditing and monitoring
  Supports ‘subject access requests’ by auditing data access, changes and submissions, ensuring transparency and compliance. 
• Data re-use across NHSE services 
  Makes patient information available wherever it’s needed to build more seamless, personalised care journeys.
• Ingest large or bespoke data sets
  Message Exchange for Social care and Health (MESH) enables bulk upload and the transformation of large, bespoke data sets.  

PDM gives NHSE product teams everything they need to manage patient data securely and at scale. We’re aiming to prevent duplication of effort by removing the need to build costly, bespoke infrastructure from scratch. We also aim to reduce user friction and enable more personalised experiences. 

PDM is for NHSE teams that: 

• collect data directly from patients or clinical systems 
• need to make patient data reusable across products and services 
• currently store patient data in local or custom-built solutions 

By building on PDM, teams can begin to reuse patient data across journeys and services, this includes the ability to store and retrieve patient-asserted data, such as self-reported symptoms, lifestyle inputs, or home test results. These inputs can be surfaced again to pre-fill forms or enable patient-initiated follow-ups. 

By adopting PDM, teams can develop against a platform that’s: 

• FHIR standard-compliant 
• information governance-ready 
• auditable 
• built for reuse and interoperability 

Clinical use and decision support 

Make structured data (for example, observations and risk scores) available for clinicians to use alongside other health information during consultations or care planning. 

Example: Blood pressure readings from health checks used to inform treatment options. 

Reuse for autofill 

Store patient-entered data to pre-populate forms or repeat interactions across services, improving user experience. 

Example: Pre-filling a smoking status question in a lifestyle intervention tool. 

Service-specific use 

Supports temporary storage for data used in a specific interaction or user journey, such as onboarding or registration. 

Example: Contact details provided during GP registration. 

Lifetime store 

Store high-value records that need to follow a patient over time. 

Example: Documents 

Sharing for wider clinical use 

Enable data to be securely reused across multiple services for continuity of care. 

Example: Care plans visible to multiple providers supporting a patient.

Interoperability routing (transient use) 

Support short-term storage of data in transit as it is routed across systems. 

Example: Routing lab results between platforms. 

Short-term retention 

PDM currently supports use cases that need to store data for a short time only and are focused on improving direct care. In practice, this means PDM holds and shares patient data only for as long as needed to support a specific care interaction, ensuring it is timely, relevant, and actionable. 

For example, a service may collect observations during a user journey, store them in PDM, and then retrieve them for clinician use or patient follow-up, all without needing to build a new data store or integration. When the episode concludes, or the data is persisted elsewhere, it no longer needs to be retained in PDM. 

This transactional approach enables services to: 

• ensure real-time access to current health information 
• support short-term clinical decision-making without long-term storage burdens 
• reduce dependency on bespoke solutions and fragmented flows 

Long-term retention

PDM is also exploring non-transactional use cases that involve longer-term data storage and wider sharing across services. For example, storing a patient’s blood pressure data so it can be reliably accessed by multiple services, ensures clinicians and patients have a consistent, trusted view of critical health data. 

PDM is a shared foundation for building safe, consistent, and patient-centered products and services. These core principles guide how data is handled across all use cases using the platform.

1. Centralised governance 
Common information governance and data protection impact assessment (DPIA) challenges are handled once, not repeated across services. 

2. Data reuse is the default 
Data entered once can be reused securely and appropriately across services. 

3. Transparency with source systems 
All reuse aligns with the original system's access and usage policies. 

4. Patients control their own data 
Patient-entered data is always visible to the patient; shared only with consent. 

PDM is currently in private beta, public beta is planned for April 2026. 

This is a silver service, (24/7 platform availability; supported Mon–Fri, 8am–6pm excluding bank holidays). 

Read our PDM roadmap to see the work we have planned.

To find out more about using PDM, contact [email protected]