When a hospital's IT department asks what needs integrating, the answer "nothing" settles the conversation in two minutes. It is one of the eight questions and usually the one that unblocks everything: no integration means no IT project, no development schedule, no third-party dependency.
But there is a price, and it is fair to state it: the session log stays where the system is, and not in the patient's clinical record.
Why that matters
The clinical record is where care is accounted for. If something is not there, for practical purposes it did not happen:
- the doctor seeing the patient the following week does not know sessions happened;
- handover does not include it;
- an audit does not find it;
- and if anyone later wants to study what was done, the data sits elsewhere.
On the other side there is a real advantage, which we explained regarding the European Health Data Space: by not collecting clinical data and not being an electronic health record system, the regulatory surface is small.
The three routes
1. A manual note in the record. Whoever ran the session writes a line in the hospital system, as they would for any other non-pharmacological intervention.
- Cost: thirty seconds per session, and it depends on someone remembering.
- Gain: it is in the record, with authorship and date, in the system the institution already audits.
- This is the route we recommend to start with, and in most services it is the only one that ever exists.
2. Periodic export. The system's log is exported and attached or summarised, typically by period or by patient.
- Cost: someone has to do it, and what ends up in the record is a summary rather than the detail.
- Gain: it does not depend on each shift's memory.
- Useful when there are many sessions and manual logging degrades.
3. Custom integration. Making the system write into the hospital system.
- Cost: it is an IT project, with everything that implies — scope, schedule, security, maintenance, and a dependency that then exists forever.
- Gain: automatic and complete.
- It is not what this system does today, and be wary of anyone promising it as a simple matter. Integrating with hospital systems rarely is.
What the manual note should contain
If you take route 1 — and you probably will — it is worth agreeing the content beforehand, because the difference between a useful note and a useless one is small and decides everything.
A useful note: what was done, how long, and what was observed in the words of what was seen. "Twelve-minute session, beach scenario; stayed calm, talked about the Algarve, asked to repeat tomorrow."
A useless note: "VR session carried out." It tells the next reader nothing.
And one that should not be written: conclusions the system does not support. "Session reduced anxiety" is a clinical inference; if whoever writes it is a clinician taking responsibility, it is theirs. It is not the equipment's — which does not assess or measure emotional states.
What exists on our side
The log of every session: what played, when, for how long, whether it was stopped and at what point. It is operational information about equipment use, held inside the institution, and it is what feeds routes 1 and 2.
What does not exist: automatic writing into the record, and any field that looks like a clinical outcome.
In short
- Not integrating is an advantage at installation and a cost at the far end.
- If it is not in the record, for practical purposes it did not happen.
- Three routes: manual note, periodic export, custom integration — in rising order of cost and fragility.
- Start with the manual note, and agree what it should contain before the first session.
- Never write into the record a conclusion the equipment does not support.