Harnessing digital must be top priority for NHS’ next leader
- 18 March 2025
Harnessing digital must be a top priority for NHS’s next leader writes Mike Bracken, cofounder of Public Digital and keynote speaker at Digital Health Rewired 25.
Last week we saw an extraordinary day of news from NHS England with the announcement of its imminent demise.
This will obviously be a difficult time for NHSE staff, who I know are a dedicated and passionate workforce motivated by their desire to serve others and improve health outcomes in this country.
However, this radical shake-up of how the NHS is run does undoubtedly offer a huge opportunity for the service.
The next leader of the NHS must prioritise putting digital at the heart of the way the health service is run. This doesn’t just mean getting to grips with technology but also the culture and practices of internet era organisations.
Done correctly, digital can be the answer to many of the existential challenges facing the NHS. It can support with moving care from hospital to home, offering remote treatments where appropriate, balancing load across the system and scaling specialist expertise.
However, while Wes Streeting has spoken often about plans to take the NHS from analogue to digital, this won’t be possible until the underlying problems facing the way the NHS uses technology and digital are addressed.
I see those problems as twofold.
Firstly, NHS technology is currently a huge and complicated patchwork of point solutions. Every tech product serves only one specific purpose, with often little or no ability to work together with other products or across trust boundaries.
Secondly, an inattention to active market shaping means that for our most important NHS technologies market power has consolidated into a few organisations.
Over time this has led to the few organisations that monopolise the market offering products that often provide sub-optimal user experience and do not represent value for money for the taxpayer – and yet the NHS has to procure those products anyway because there are no alternatives available.
A new approach is now needed. The major digital systems that are procured for and underpin the NHS should be seen as public interest technology: one big piece of national infrastructure, like the highways network, where each product forms part of the whole and is run for the public benefit, rather than only serving a local purpose.
The NHS must shape a vendor market that delivers true value for public money by incentivising competition – driving down prices while improving quality.
This can be achieved through greater investment in national, NHS-owned platforms, actively supporting British, innovative, and bold solutions. We have a culture of technology for the public good, and the NHS should be its best version.
At the same time, the new procurement process must ensure that all NHS digital solutions adhere to a set of open standards and design requirements, drawn from best practice across the system and which all parties can join in and develop.
This would enable the NHS to move away from the current state of play where procuring off-the-shelf solutions means systems across the health service do not work effectively together. It would also set the foundations for procuring technology that all works together across the health service.
At this turning point for the NHS, we must seize the opportunity to make full advantage of what digital and tech have to offer.
The time is now to build a major digital system that can underpin our public health service for decades to come.
Done correctly, this could save the NHS billions of pounds and, most importantly, help deliver better outcomes both for those working in the service and for the general public.
