MCH Software Solutions: Interconnected healthcare platform
MCH Software Solutions was founded on a simple but powerful observation: healthcare facilities were managing staffing, scheduling, and communication through disconnected systems that created more problems than they solved.
Harry Akerman, a consultant anaesthetist at the University Hospital Southampton and visiting Professor at the University of Southampton, had spent years seeing first-hand the inefficiencies and difficulties in healthcare staffing. Rather than accept these limitations, he partnered with experienced healthcare technology executives Craig Smith and Mike Crompton to build something better.
The founding vision was clear: create integrated products designed to work together and give healthcare facilities genuine control over their operations.
Services
Product design
UX design
UI design
Technologies
React
Node.js
Team Composition
1 UI/UX designer
1 QA engineer
1 Project manager
1 Fractional CTO
Screens from app
The challenge
Healthcare facilities face a fundamental problem: their staffing, scheduling, communication, and theatre management systems operate in isolation from each other. This fragmentation creates cascading inefficiencies. Staff spend hours manually coordinating between systems. Administrators struggle to match staff availability with actual needs. Communication breaks down between departments. Theatre utilisation suffers because scheduling information isn’t visible where it’s needed. And sensitive patient and staff data sits in multiple disconnected repositories, creating compliance and security risks.
The challenge wasn’t simply building better individual tools. It was to architect a platform where six separate products could work together seamlessly, sharing information intelligently whilst maintaining complete security and compliance across the entire ecosystem.
Summit Digital's approach to building interconnected healthcare products
We started where complex projects must start: understanding the problem deeply. Through collaborative discovery with Harry and other Healthcare professionals we mapped how healthcare facilities actually work; how information flows between teams; where decisions happen; what data is critical; and what creates bottlenecks.
From here, we designed a platform architecture capable of supporting six interconnected products: Staffing (bank staff management), Communicator (automated patient communications), Anaesthetics (ad hoc theatre list management), Theatres (real-time theatre utilisation), Rostering (intelligent department scheduling), and Preferences (digital preference card management).
The technical complexity was substantial. We built a sophisticated API infrastructure using HL7 and FHIR standards, enabling controlled, structured access between products whilst maintaining governance and reducing risk. Each product only accesses the features and capabilities it needs.
Security and compliance architecture delivered:
- NHS DSP Toolkit compliance for NHS data security standards
- ISO 27001 certification with rigorous, independently audited controls
- Cyber Essentials Plus verified by external auditors
- GDPR compliance for personal data protection
- 256-bit encryption protecting highly sensitive information
- Hospital group architecture allowing both individual hospital and multi-hospital deployments
- Role-based access controls ensuring staff see only information relevant to their specialism
- Multi-user permissions delivering stronger security and improved operational efficiency
The products communicate intelligently. Information flows between each product, eliminating manual tasks and reducing costly scheduling gaps. Theatre availability updates instantly feed into rostering. Staff preferences inform scheduling decisions. Communication systems access accurate, current availability data. The result is better resource use, improved communication, and teams that can plan around genuine service demands.
Throughout development, we maintained close collaboration with the MCH leadership team, ensuring the platform evolved to match their vision and healthcare realities.
The results
MCH Software Solutions — measurable impact across the healthcare sector
MCH Staffing: enabled Nuffield Health to reduce agency spending by 30%.
Communicator: supports 30 concurrent calls on every line.
Anaesthetics application: has filled nearly 25,000 theatre lists.
Overall impact: MCH products deliver genuine control and efficiency to healthcare facilities managing complex operations.
Interconnected architecture — key outcomes:
Information flows seamlessly
Manual workarounds disappear
Healthcare teams regain time for what matters — patient care
Client perspective
"The MCH Software Solutions platform has provided huge benefits both in terms of cost, morale and process. It has simplified shift advertising to the right people with the right competencies, saving huge amounts of administration time. Before MCH Software Solutions, the management of our bank would take clinical staff members 4-7 hours a week to organise the on duty roster. MCH Software Solutions reduced this to 2 hours of an administrator's time."
