Digital transformation in the UK’s health and social care system is not just about adopting the latest technologies: it’s about building a foundation that supports meaningful change across the sector. While innovations like AI and advanced diagnostics can improve patient outcomes, striking the right balance between innovating and embedding the fundamentals is crucial.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made it clear that a shift from analogue to digital will be a key part of the government’s transformation mission for the NHS. This presents both opportunities and a new set of challenges for the system when it comes to making digital work in practice.
Let’s look at four areas of focus that can drive successful positive change in health and social care:
1. Laying the Groundwork
Discussions about digital advancement often focus on high-tech innovations, such as AI-assisted surgeries and advanced diagnostic tools. While these developments are valuable in their own right, they can overshadow the essential baseline of digital capability that is still lacking in many health and care services. Though over half of NHS trusts are currently utilising AI, more than two thirds still rely at least partially on paper-based notes. Until we establish a universal level of digital maturity across the NHS and wider care systems, the impact of advanced technologies will remain limited, ultimately affecting the quality, capacity, and efficiency of care.
2. Boosting Digital Maturity in Social Care
While the NHS has broadly made some strides in digital transformation, social care is lagging significantly behind and still lacks a coherent digital strategy. Programmes such as the DHSC’s Digitising Social Care are crucial for bridging digital and health inequalities by leveraging data and technology, but momentum for change has not quite developed at the pace it needs to, with 32% of providers still using spreadsheets to manage data.
Although the target of having 80% of CQC-registered social care providers using Digital Social Care Records (DSCRs) by March 2024 was missed, over 5,000 providers have adopted these records since the programme’s conception. The results have demonstrated notable efficiency gains and proven that both appetite and use cases for transformation are alive and well within the sector. The nature of our health and social care systems means that one simply cannot survive without the other. As demand continues to rise across the system, it’s vital that social care keeps pace with digital advancements.
3. Rethinking Procurement
The UK’s landscape for digital health solutions is diverse and rapidly evolving. However, this shift has exposed flaws in existing NHS procurement processes. Many providers independently purchase solutions that may not integrate well with their existing systems, leading to a fragmented digital environment. The lack of interoperability, the complexities of information governance, and ineffective pilot environments often mean that several piecemeal, siloed solutions are implemented within a single provider. This creates bulking software infrastructures that can burden health and care settings with inefficiencies and result in frustration and poorer outcomes for staff patients or service users.
The ability for different solutions within, and between, providers to talk to each other is a basic necessity that remains inconsistent across the system. To address this, some Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) have begun creating additional systems that link care records to improve interoperability. However, genuine success depends on all the many different providers within each ICS achieving a similar level of digital maturity, collaborating with technology suppliers to ensure that the best of the NHS is available to the rest of the NHS as Wes Streeting hopes, and committing to a truly integrated approach to care. As the recent report by Lord Darzi showed, we are a long way from that vision becoming reality.
4. Deconstructing Digital and Health Inequalities
Digital solutions have become increasingly embedded in our daily lives, and healthcare is no exception: in September 2024, one in twenty GP appointments were performed online, the highest number since records began. While digital solutions have improved access for some – such as allowing people living with chronic illness to manage prescriptions from home or facilitating more accessible A&E triaging for people whose first language is not English – they also risk exacerbating existing health inequalities.
There are of course immediate considerations that could threaten to exclude people based on digital literacy and cost of devices. Done poorly, these innovations can also entrench existing disparities – for instance with algorithms which reinforce harmful biases. It’s therefore essential that from beginning to end, digital solutions are co-produced and regulated in a meaningful sense to ensure they are well equipped to improve access to quality healthcare and eradicate barriers.
Conclusion
Digital technology has the potential to revolutionise our approach to healthcare and wellness in the UK. Through intelligent scheduling, it can be the difference between district nurses being able to visit 10 or 30 patients in one week. Through wearable monitoring technology, it can enable a teenager living with diabetes to safely and easily manage their condition without the difficulty of pricking their fingers for blood at school. And through fall detection software, it can be the difference between a distressing hospital stay for an older person and remaining safe and comfortable at home.
We have a long way to go before we can consider the UK’s health and care system truly digital, but as we move towards that goal, we must actively drive these four considerations to realise an equitable and efficient digital future for all.