Wayfinder: Transforming Patient Access to NHS Care

The Solution

Servita designed, built and delivered the National Patient Care Aggregator (PCA) in just five months. This secure, cloud-hosted platform collates and normalises appointment and referral data from multiple Trust systems and Patient Engagement Portals, surfacing it through the NHS App. For the first time, millions of patients can:

• View all their outpatient and secondary care appointments in one place

• Access letters, questionnaires and notifications digitally

• See their waiting list status and understand what to expect next

• Receive notifications in the NHS App about their hospital care

Overcoming the Barriers

The delivery of Wayfinder broke through challenges that had blocked progress for years:

• Scale and complexity: securely integrating data from hundreds of trusts and their respective IT systems

• Pace: achieving in months what was expected to take years

• Governance and safety: ensuring compliance with NHS, GDS, cyber and clinical safety standards

• Usability: making the service accessible for all patients, including those less digitally confident

By initially partnering with five patient-facing service providers and using a mix of APIs and secure web handoffs, Servita enabled rapid scale-up without requiring Trusts to rip and replace their existing systems. Wayfinder is now live across more than 100+ NHS Trusts, used more than 118 million times by patients, and continues to expand into new care settings, including mental health and community health

Sustainability by Design

Wayfinder is also a milestone in sustainable healthcare technology. It was the first live digital NHS service to report its carbon impact, embedding sustainability metrics directly into the business case and delivery model. Working with Greener NHS and Greenpixie, Servita measured, validated and reduced the environmental footprint of patient communications:

• 488,000 fewer missed appointments (DNAs) per year – avoiding around 8.5kt CO₂e (8,500 tonnes)

• 30 million fewer sheets of paper and 10 million fewer letters posted each year

• 15,247 kg CO₂e saved through reduced reliance on phone calls

• 1,114 tonnes CO₂e avoided annually via digital-first patient communications

• 99% reduction in emissions per appointment letter (from 72g CO₂e per printed letter to 0.057g CO₂e digitally)

• PCA transactions produce just 1.37g CO₂e per interaction, a fraction of traditional methods

Architected using sustainable-by-design principles, the PCA is cloud-hosted on AWS, leverages a stateless architecture, and is optimised with NodeJS and Kubernetes for efficient compute and minimal emissions. Download the full environmental impact paper here: Wayfinder – Reducing the NHS’s Environmental Impact Through Digital Transformation

The Results

• Now supporting 38+ million active NHS App users across 100+ NHS Trusts

• Millions saved in administration, printing and postage costs

• A critical national infrastructure service underpinning the NHS elective care recovery

• Tangible, independently audited sustainability benefits, reducing waste and carbon emissions at scale

Servita’s Role

Servita was a key supplier, responsible for designing, building, hosting and maintaining the PCA, and served as the IT Service Management (ITSM) provider for Wayfinder. We continue to work with NHSE delivering high-availability, mission-critical national services, ensuring resilience, clinical safety and continuous improvement.

“Servita came highly recommended as a team for tackling national scale, digital transformation, but surpassed all expectations. They supported me, as the Product Director, to build Wayfinder, a newly conceived service via the NHS App to allow patients to directly manage their hospital appointments and access support and tools whilst on waiting lists. 

Servita felt like part of the team within the first week, rapidly getting to grips with the challenges and proposing a practical approach to product development, all the while understanding the level of ambition and passion for the patient experience. The programme could hardly have been more complex, with seven million patients to serve, hundreds of hospitals, and a landscape of incumbent third-party providers, with pressure to deliver a solution in unprecedented timescales, launching in less than a year. Servita approached the problem intelligently, insightfully and critically, at pace. 

The Servita team instinctively understood the need to work through complex processes, and engage hundreds of stakeholders to overcome delivery barriers, all whilst building a delightful experience, and a commercial operating model that retained agency for the Patient Engagement Portals (PEPs) already in the market. Their digital healthcare experience shone through at every stage, building credibility for the programme, and creating a scalable flexible architecture to deliver a standardised national service, which responded to existing variation and complexity. 

For the last three years, since its inception, Servita has been the engine behind realising the Wayfinder Programme vision, delivering a live service in 9 months, and a nationally scaled service within three years. Today, the service is the third most used interactive service in the NHS App, with over 7m Monthly Active Users, with only messaging (NHS Notify) and viewing Medical Records, recording higher usage. Servita has been at the very heart of shifting the NHS from analogue to digital, partnering with the NHS to build a service which has become the most successful in the history of the NHS App.”

– Martin O’Neil (Deputy Director of Digital Diagnostics and Therapeutics, Products and Platforms, Transformation Directorate, NHS England)