NHS

Giving nurses time back, and saving the NHS £300,000 a year

Before DonorPath, specialist nurses managed organ donation through paper forms, phone calls and an ageing laptop-based system. At the point families agreed to donation—often in incredibly difficult circumstances—nurses were spending valuable time completing administration instead of focusing on patients and their families.

DonorPath digitised the entire organ donation process. Now deployed across more than 260 hospitals, it gives nurses a secure mobile tool that works wherever they are, removing paperwork, reducing reliance on laptops and streamlining data capture.

The benefits go beyond efficiency. Entering data directly into the app has improved accuracy and significantly reduced clarification calls from transplant centres, removing friction when every minute counts.

Giving surgeons the information they need, when they need it

If DonorPath supports nurses at the point of donation, TransplantPath supports surgeons at the point of decision.

NHSBT’s goal is a world-leading organ donation and transplantation service that maximises the potential for deceased donations. TransplantPath is the digital infrastructure that makes that ambition operationally possible.

When an organ becomes available, transplant teams need immediate access to patient data, organ suitability information and clinical imagery, often overnight and across multiple sites.

The legacy system was slow, insecure, fragmented, not built for the mobile or the always-on nature of transplant surgery. TransplantPath replaced it with a secure mobile platform that gives retrieval and transplant surgeons rapid access to the information they need, while enabling organ offers to be accepted or declined through a standardised, auditable digital workflow.

Rebuilding how a critical NHS division delivers software

By 2024, the challenge was no longer what to build, but how to build it. Although leadership supported agile principles, delivery still relied heavily on waterfall practices. Development and testing ran sequentially, user acceptance testing came at the end of the delivery cycle, and work was spread across multiple reporting tools and spreadsheets. Apadmi and NHSBT also worked in separate Jira environments, creating duplicated effort and limiting visibility across the programme.

Previous attempts to modernise ways of working hadn’t taken hold. This time, the focus shifted from introducing agile processes to embedding agile capability within delivery teams that understood the live pressures of a safety-critical environment.

Embedding agile coaching

An Apadmi Agile Coach worked full time within NHSBT delivery teams, helping more than 60 people adopt agile ways of working through day-to-day delivery rather than classroom training.

For complex cross-team programmes such as OrganPath, the Nexus scaling framework was introduced to coordinate governance, manage dependencies and improve collaboration across multiple delivery squads.

One shared delivery model

Three strategic migrations moved teams into company-managed Jira projects with standardised workflows, creating a single view of delivery across every workstream.

Apadmi and NHSBT also moved from separate Jira environments and formal hand-offs to a shared workspace with joint backlog ownership, enabling both organisations to work as one integrated delivery team.

Continuous Quality

Testing became part of every sprint rather than a separate phase. Apadmi quality assurance engineers worked alongside NHSBT testers to resolve issues as they emerged, replacing sequential testing with continuous quality throughout delivery.

Four training cohorts upskilled more than 60 team members, while Communities of Practice ensured knowledge continued to spread after the initial transformation.

An internal Jira Admin Group, established during the transformation, reduced tooling change requests from days or weeks to hours—or even minutes—removing a persistent bottleneck from day-to-day delivery.

Agile in regulated environments

Safety-critical organisations are often seen as too heavily governed for agile delivery. NHSBT demonstrates the opposite. By integrating agile practices into existing governance, rather than replacing it, delivery became faster, more transparent and more predictable without compromising patient safety or regulatory compliance. 

Over time, the relationship evolved from client and supplier into a genuinely integrated delivery team. Shared tools, joint backlog ownership, embedded coaching and paired quality assurance replaced formal hand-offs with shared ownership. The result was better visibility, stronger collaboration and faster delivery across the programme.