Wirral Hospitals NHS Trust, a 1200-bed general hospital with 90 wards, created the Path.Finder healthcare information system in 1994 to share research and clinical guidelines among healthcare professionals both within the Trust and the wider healthcare community. Recently the Trust has replaced the first version of Path.Finder, which ran on proprietry hypertext technology, with a solution based around XML.

Data formatted using XML is delivered through a browser inteface, which has enabled the Trust to roll Path.Finder out to a wider audience. In addition XML allows the Trust to incorporate a greater range of media types and link Path.Finder guidelines to web-based information provided by other healthcare organisations. Working with the Software company Graphnet, the Trust has been able to create a publishing tool which allows staff to create and maintain XML documents.