Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust
A smarter way to route clinical event notifications to the people who need to act on them
Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust is an NHS organisation delivering a broad range of acute and specialist services across the Rotherham area.
The NHS generates enormous volumes of event data. The challenge has never been collecting it. It has been making it useful: getting the right information to the right people, at the moment it matters.
The Problem
NHS systems generate alerts constantly. Not all of them are relevant to every team.
When clinical and operational events are logged across a trust, the data exists. What is often missing is the mechanism to filter it intelligently and route it to whoever needs to act on it. Without that layer, staff are either flooded with notifications they cannot use or left unaware of events they should know about.
The gap between data generated and action taken is a structural problem in NHS data infrastructure. PACE was designed to close it.
The Challenge
A fragmented approach to internal notification
Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust had rich event data flowing through its systems but no consistent mechanism for determining who should be notified when something happened. Routing was manual, incomplete or dependent on individuals knowing to look.
A system that needed modernisation
PACE was originally created in 2020. By the time The Curve took over responsibility for it, the platform was running on outdated dependencies and ageing infrastructure. The underlying logic was sound, but the system needed significant modernisation before it could be reliably extended or maintained.
Configurability across a complex organisation
A trust the size of Rotherham has multiple departments, sites and teams, each with different events they need to monitor and different people they need to notify. Any notification system had to be highly configurable rather than one-size-fits-all.
Connecting to live clinical systems without disrupting them
PACE needed to monitor event streams flowing through Rotherham's existing clinical infrastructure. Those systems were live, in active use and not available for modification. The integration had to be read-only and non-intrusive: drawing data from the trust's existing systems without requiring any changes to them, and without introducing any risk to the clinical workflows that depended on them.
The Solution
PACE, the Patient Alerts and Care Engine, is a web-based notification platform that monitors the event streams flowing through Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust's clinical systems and routes targeted notifications to the right people when defined criteria are met. It sits alongside the trust's existing infrastructure, reading from it without modifying it. No changes were required to the clinical systems it connects to.
Staff can configure notification rules based on event type, patient identifier, severity level and other filters. When an event matches a rule, PACE triggers a notification through the channel that has been configured: email, SMS or Microsoft Teams. Notifications use customisable templates, allowing teams to define exactly what information is surfaced and how.
The platform is live and in active use at Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust.
Our Approach
Inheriting and stabilising a live system
The Curve took over an existing platform and made it production-stable. The first priority was modernising the underlying infrastructure: updating to current software dependencies, migrating the CI/CD pipeline from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, and addressing the accumulated technical debt that had built up over years of minimal maintenance.
Integrating with existing clinical infrastructure without touching it
The integration work required PACE to connect to the event streams produced by Rotherham's existing clinical systems, without those systems requiring any modification. The Curve built the connection layer to be entirely passive on the clinical side: PACE listens, it does not write. The trust's clinical teams experienced no change to their systems, no downtime and no new dependencies introduced into the infrastructure they depend on. PACE simply became aware of events that were already happening.
Extending the filtering and subscription model
With the platform stabilised, the team expanded PACE's capability. The notification configuration system was extended to give administrators greater control over how filters are defined and how subscriptions are set up, making it easier to manage alerts across a complex, multi-department organisation without centralised intervention.
Keeping it running
PACE is a system the trust depends on. The Curve provides ongoing maintenance and support, including security updates, dependency management and monitoring, to ensure it continues to operate reliably as the underlying infrastructure around it evolves.
The Results
A live system serving an active NHS trust: PACE is currently running in production at Rotherham NHS Foundation Trust, processing event data and routing notifications across the organisation. It is a critical part of how the trust manages internal communications around patient events.
A modernised, maintainable platform: The platform was brought from an ageing, dependency-heavy state to a current, maintainable codebase. Migration to GitHub Actions, updated to .NET 10 and current dependency stack, and improved monitoring have extended its operational life and reduced the risk of unplanned downtime.
Configurable notifications across departments and channels: Teams across the trust can now define their own alert filters and notification subscriptions without needing to request changes centrally. Notifications reach people by email, SMS or Teams, with templated messaging that surfaces exactly the patient data relevant to each use case.
An NHS trust generates thousands of data points every day. PACE makes a small but critical contribution to how that data becomes action: filtering the signal from the noise and getting it to whoever needs it, through whatever channel they are monitoring. It is a quiet system. When it is working well, nobody notices it. They just get the right notification at the right time.