Dr. Matea Deliu is a General Practitioner, health informatician, and senior clinical leader with extensive experience in digital health transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), and clinical informatics. She currently serves as Chief Clinical Information Officer at Bromley Healthcare and Clinical Lead for Digital Delivery at NHS South East London Integrated Care Board. Holding a PhD in Health Informatics from the University of Manchester, Dr. Deliu combines frontline clinical practice with executive leadership to advance AI governance, population health analytics, and technology-enabled care. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and is recognized for her contributions to digital innovation, clinical safety, and healthcare transformation across the NHS.

The Digital Front Door at the Primary–Secondary Care Interface: Clinical Safety, Equity, and Data Integration at National Scale   The interface between primary and secondary care is where a health system loses most of what it cannot afford to lose. Avoidable harm, delay, and cost concentrate at the handoffs: the referral that arrives without context, the discharge summary the GP never receives, the test repeated because a result did not cross a boundary. These are not routing failures to be solved by faster signposting. They are failures of information continuity between settings that were never built to share a record. The digital front door governs entry to this interface — who reaches the right care, when, and on what evidence. How it is designed is a question of clinical safety and equity, not access and convenience alone. A front door that presumes a smartphone, mobile data, and confidence excludes the patients who carry the heaviest illness burden. The NHS App is the working example at population scale. With over 30 million registered users, it carries GP appointment booking, repeat prescriptions, record access, AI-enabled triage pilots, and — surfaced from trust patient portals — secondary care appointments and letters. The difficulty is not the interface a patient sees. It sits beneath: interoperability across records held in different GP and trust systems to different standards, fit with how a GP works within a ten-minute consultation, adoption, and the risk that a front door assuming digital capability widens the inequity it should reduce. For this audience, an interface problem at this scale sets concrete demands on the methods you build: data integration across records that share no common standard, model governance and safety assurance fit for clinical use, and evaluation inside live clinical workflows rather than retrospective datasets. The design question is how to improve access for patients who cannot self-serve without constraining what is offered to those who can.