The Prime Minister kicked off 2025 with his ‘prescription’ to reverse the decline of the NHS.
His ambitions are worthy and urgent, including reducing waiting list backlogs, resisting full-blown privatisation, and providing healthcare professionals and the public with the tools and technologies they need to give and receive care. All of which depends on transforming the NHS from ‘analogue to digital’ – as will be set out by the Health Secretary in his 10 Year Health Plan.
Crucial to achieving the PM and Health Secretary’s ambitions is creating a ‘single patient record’ for every patient under the NHS. Doing so unites patient health information, test results and medical history under the NHS app: a single source of truth that is accessible to patients and healthcare professionals anytime, anywhere.
The benefits are many and often lifesaving. It reduces errors caused by incomplete or inconsistent information, such as preventing dangerous drug interactions or duplicate prescriptions. And it enhances efficiency across the NHS. Consolidated patient data eliminates duplicate tests, scans and administrative tasks. We have all heard stories of friends and relatives, wheeled into surgery to have it cancelled because the surgeon does not have the correct notes. Data-driven insights can help triage patients based on clinical urgency, which will help reduce Accident and Emergency and ambulance wait times.
While creating a single patient record is a big task, it is the foundation on which to build all other transformative technologies. Without it, clinical health algorithms, population health initiatives and predictive technologies will all be limited.
To make the NHS as strong and stable as possible for the population of the UK, it’s critical to work with the private sector as a partner to deliver this project. The Federated Data Platform initiative introduced last year was a significant step toward breaking down NHS data silos. But it’s missing an element of patient engagement that can empower patients to manage their own care plans.
How do you create a ‘single patient record’?
A ‘single patient record’ is one that summarises patient health information, test results and patient letters in one place. It is a method of empowering patients to take control of their own medical history and ongoing care. Collecting and synthesising operational and clinical data in one place is an important part of supporting modern patient care. Social care and community data also becomes increasingly important as the NHS expands into these areas, enabling holistic patient decisions.
Solutions that host this patient history and make it available through the NHS App and other platforms are being deployed across NHS Trusts, GP surgeries and emergency services across the UK. This speeds up high-quality care and empowers patients to manage their journey towards full health.
But to create a single patient record, it’s key to start with a high standard of data. The NHS has an estimated 600 million patient interactions per year, or 1.7 million a day – each of these interactions informs the vast pool of data that the health service has in its locker.
The challenge with human data is differentiating between entities with the same name, address, date of birth or similarities in patient details. Of each of the 1.7 million daily interactions with patients, there will be hundreds of John Smiths – some even with the same date of birth. It’s important not only to distinguish between each of these people, but to label each different entity in a way that is distinct and easy for the technologies to find. Master Data Management (MDM) and other traditional technologies will not provide the accuracy needed for NHS care – newer technology that leverages AI can manage and sort data with greater accuracy and scale, identifying duplicates and delivering complete views of different patient entities.
To support a true neighbourhood model, NHS staff need the ability to locally create and maintain records, whilst providing a single view across all other sources with access controls. And to make this work, data consistency must be maintained throughout.
Digitising healthcare starts with unifying data.
Unifying healthcare data at scale is not an easy task, particularly where, historically, the data foundation has been siloed and inaccessible. The ability to deliver data products starts with the quality of the data foundation itself, and its usability. Analysts must be able to extract insights from the data rather than have it locked away in a black box.
Arguably most important is that trusts need to ensure that individual datapoints are both accurate and reliable, understood in isolation before drawing connections to related data points and connected behaviours. Once these data sources are cleaned brick by brick, they can build a strong data building – no longer fragmented – that can then contribute to overall pictures of the Trust’s patient data and later a regional and national picture.
When the data foundation is ready, we can apply Entity Resolution (ER) to build a unified view of multiple disparate data sources. This not only allows the data networks to feed into knowledge graphs and easy-to-read analytics, but it can unlock accurate and trusted data-driven decisions. By seeing every patient or specialty as its own entity in a wider picture of the country’s health, clinicians and staff can make quicker decisions that will lead to quicker diagnosis-to-treatment and optimise patient outcomes.
As NHS Trusts have typically shared paper letters to inform patients of future appointments, those patient letters have not all been tracked and recorded in places easily accessible to corresponding GP surgeries – and vice versa. Primary Care Networks join GPs that makes it easier to collaborate and share best practices. But these were only formally established in 2019 and still need an institutionalised way of unifying their data.
Primary care data will be critical to population health management, as it’s the first point of contact for many patients and holds the most complete picture of a patient’s history across specialties. Once these independent healthcare practices can feed into one larger dataset – in a mutually beneficial way with the FDP – the dotted array of patient data and medical history can be connected by ER.
The NHS can operationalize AI.
Once the NHS has a clean, strong and unified dataset, there is ample opportunity to apply AI and other advanced technologies. Trusts across the NHS are using AI for both clinical and operational needs.
For example, AI is being used in various NHS trusts to validate patients on the secondary care waitlist and ensure patients with the most urgent needs are prioritised. Not only does this allow some people automatically on the waitlist to be removed and reduce wait times, but it paints a more complete picture of the patient population.
However, it’s still not being leveraged at the scale it can be. AI can be used to understand diseases, improve diagnoses and ensure patient safety. But it can also be used to plan NHS services and evaluate how efficient and effective the services are. For the past few years, the government has been assessing private-sector companies and existing technologies that can help improve the NHS without cost to patient care. These AI tools can do a number of things; they can explore clinical research that can lead to faster diagnoses. They can also identify patients who won’t attend their appointments and refill their appointment slots. These are examples of the opportunities that lie ahead.
Data will open opportunities for the NHS in 2025.
Creating a single patient record is a formidable challenge. But one that must be achieved for the Prime Minister’s wider ambitions to be realised. Working hand in hand with the private sector will allow it to be built efficiently – learning the lessons of where companies have delivered similar efforts elsewhere in public and private organisations.
It will also usher in a decade of public and private enterprise, in which companies, Trusts and the NHS more broadly can build new products and solutions that sit on top of this essential data platform. This marriage of – in the PM’s words – ‘prescriptions’ will allow us to deliver a more efficient NHS with a more engaged patient population.
About the Author
Ram Rajaraman is Healthcare Industry Leader at Quantexa. When it comes to making the right decisions for your organization, more is possible with the right data, in the right context. Quantexa’s Decision Intelligence Platform gives customers the ability to understand their data by connecting siloed systems and visualizing complex relationships. The result is a single view of data that becomes their most trusted and reusable resource across the organization. Quantexa helps customers establish a culture of confident decision making at strategic, operational, and tactical levels to mitigate risk and seize opportunities on their path to building efficient and resilient organizations.
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