One Platform, Two Completely Different Users: Building Medindex for the NHS | Digital Marmalade [Skip to main content](#main-content) ![](https://www.digitalmarmalade.co.uk/pagebuilder/946/download/content_id) Medindex is a clinical information platform, built by Digital Marmalade that gives clinicians fast access to clinical guidance, pathways and local services. At the same time, it gives patients and carers a different view of the same system — written for a completely different reader. Medindex deploys the platform into NHS Integrated Care Systems across England, where it can be customised to meet the needs of each ICS. Both audiences sit within one platform, sharing the same content structure, but the experience of using each one is designed to feel entirely separate. That's the central challenge this piece of healthcare software development was built around. Most information platforms serve one primary audience. Medindex has to serve two at once, without either feeling like a compromise. The ten-minute constraint ------------------------- The clinician view was designed to be used inside a GP consultation. That's a hard constraint to build around. A GP reaching for information mid-appointment doesn't have time to browse — they need to find precise clinical guidance in seconds, trust that it's current, and get back to the patient. Every decision about the interface, the search, the categories and the content labels was shaped by this. Designing for speed in a clinical setting is different from designing for speed in a consumer one. The cost of a confusing interface isn't just frustration. It's time taken away from the person sitting across the desk. That raises the stakes on decisions that might seem minor elsewhere — how many clicks to reach a pathway, how search results are ordered, whether a category label matches how a clinician actually thinks about a condition. The same information, written twice ----------------------------------- The patient and carer view draws on the same structured content as the clinical view, but it's written and presented completely differently. Where the clinical interface assumes medical training and values precision, the patient view assumes no clinical background and prioritises clarity and practical support. In some cases the same underlying information appears in two entirely different forms. In others, the patient view surfaces content — local services, practical care guides, legal and financial information — that the clinical view doesn't need at all. HPAL, the live palliative care platform now serving 13 boroughs across North West and North Central London, shows this clearly. A clinician using HPAL can access detailed symptom guidance written by senior palliative physicians. A carer using the same platform finds practical information about caring at home, local support services and bereavement resources — written in a tone that reflects the difficulty of what they're facing. Localisation as a core feature ------------------------------ One of the less visible features of Medindex is its borough-level localisation. Services differ across NHS areas, and a platform that ignores this quickly becomes unreliable. Users stop trusting content that doesn't match what they find when they look for local provision. Medindex handles this through location selection that filters content to show relevant local services, while keeping the core clinical and patient-facing content consistent. Getting this right required careful thinking about the content model — how to structure information so that local variation can be layered in cleanly, without duplicating the content base for every borough. DTAC compliance and editorial design ------------------------------------ Medindex meets the NHS Digital Technology Assessment Criteria, which sets a high bar for clinical safety, data handling, accessibility and usability. In healthcare software development, meeting standards like DTAC isn't something you can retrofit — it has to be built in from the start, shaping decisions about data architecture, authentication, content governance and accessibility before a line of interface code is written. The CMS was also designed for the way NHS editorial teams work — often with multiple contributors across different clinical specialties, and with a need to keep content current without adding workload. Clinical content can be updated efficiently, which matters when out-of-date information has real consequences. If you're building healthcare software that needs to serve more than one audience, or that needs to work within NHS infrastructure, we'd be glad to talk it through. 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