Wales is one of Medilogik’s longest-standing customers. Aneurin Bevan University Health Board has used its endoscopy management system since 2015
Since then, every Welsh health board has adopted Medilogik EMS, with some sites migrating from on-premises deployments to today’s cloud-based system over time.
Cardiff and Vale University Health Board’s go-live in May 2026 completed the all-Wales picture and paved the way for an all-Wales approach to optimising the use of Medilogik EMS.
With every health board live, Wales had a single EMS, but it didn’t have a single way of working with it. Each health board had configured the system around its own workflows and was collecting different data sets, which made comparison difficult.
“We have a data modelling team that are building dashboards to further enable health boards to explore their performance and outcomes across a series of variables,” explains Elizabeth Hughes from NHS Wales Performance and Improvement. “But the dashboards will only be as good as the data behind them; and there were many inconsistencies.”
Cancellation reasons illustrated the problem. Across Wales, health boards were recording why patients were cancelling appointments at different levels of detail. In total, more than 100 different reasons were being captured, and there was also heavy reliance on ‘other’ and free text entries.
The challenge was to align the seven health boards, to secure consensus on a slimmed down set of cancelation reasons that could be used for effective comparison between services, and to make the changes stick.
To help Wales to get the most from its roll-out of Medilogik EMS, NHS Wales and Medilogik hold regular meetings with health board endoscopy leads. Agreeing a slimmed down list of cancellation reasons was one of the first issues to be tackled in these meetings.
Medilogik created a templated list of the reasons in use, so people could see, in tick-box form, what each health board was doing. This helped them to compare approaches and agree best practice. Using the template, a dramatically shorter list of 20 cancellation reasons was agreed.
“We managed to reduce the number of cancellation reasons by 70%!”
Elizabeth Hughes
Because cancellation reasons are a standard piece of Medilogik EMS reporting functionality, health boards could go into the system to implement the new list. Medilogik simply updated NHS Wales as the changes were made.
The new list of cancellation reasons went live on 1 April. NHS Wales will review the configuration in a year’s time, to make sure it is still optimal.
Benefits are already visible. With a single, national list of cancellation reasons and far less free text information, endoscopy reporting is cleaner. The anomalies that made comparison difficult have gone, and health boards have a clear picture of why appointments are being cancelled.
That’s information they can act on, to maximise the efficiency of services, improve working conditions for staff and, most importantly, to support patients. Just as importantly, the project has proved the model.
Wales now has a replicable approach for aligning endoscopy practice and reporting across its health boards: pick a manageable topic, compare current practice, agree a way forward, and implement that locally in Medilogik EMS.
“This work shows how Wales can come together. We were able to do this quite quickly, and that was because everybody got around the table and agreed the way forward.”
The same approach could be adopted by other regions that want to take a collaborative approach to addressing the changes faced by their endoscopy services. “Working together as a region can be a powerful catalyst for change,” says Tracy Finlayson from Medilogik. “We really welcome this approach, because we know that if a whole region asks for our support or for a product change, it is something that services want, and that people will use, to make endoscopy better for everyone.”
