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This article is part of our Opinions section, where we invite industry professionals to share their views on the most pressing technology questions of our time.
The NHS has been prescribed a 3% real-terms budget increase by the Treasury during the 2025/26-2028/29 period. In numerical terms, this is an increase in budget from £195.6bn in 2025/26 to £226bn in 2028/29. However, the large number of operating priorities set out in the NHS Performance Assessment Framework for 2025/26 means that budgets and resourcing remain an ongoing concern for NHS trusts.
The government has set out expectations that this increase in budget will cover any ‘business as usual’ demands and activities, pay, non-pay inflation, and any other cost pressures and expectations.
It is also expecting the increase to achieve its priority ambition for 92% of patients to start treatment within 18 weeks of referral by the end of this Parliament in 2029. To deliver this, it requires the NHS to increase its annual productivity growth to 2%, an ambitious target given productivity remains 5–11% lower than pre-pandemic levels.
With this in mind, resourcing remains an ongoing challenge for the NHS – a challenge which trusts may likely turn to technological advancement to achieve increased productivity. The idea of the NHS utilising innovation to ease budgeting pressures is not a new one. The NHS has been championing frugal innovation for well over a decade. However, there now needs to be a mindset shift away from a focus on ‘doing more with less’.
Digitisation gives the NHS access to vast amounts of data, but if not used correctly, it could be missing valuable opportunities to distil it for the most effective use. Currently, it is thought that up to 80% of patient data is ‘unstructured data‘ that’s essentially invisible to many digital systems. The focus must now look to building structured data systems that enable the NHS to intelligently use data and productively maximise value in existing efficiencies: a ‘do better with less’ mindset.
If we’re to do better with less, it is important to know what that means in practice. At the moment, much of the data the NHS possesses is unstructured, scattered across our health system. Valuable data can be difficult to find quickly, meaning that building a full picture of a patient’s history takes significant time and manual effort.
The solution is a data framework that is interoperable across system and organisational boundaries. Technologies, such as application programming interfaces (APIs) and peer-to-peer interfaces, create a middleman between different systems, allowing them to communicate and share data between them. Clinicians and administrators gain access to data and, furthermore, surface relevant information quickly and clearly at the point of care.
An integrated system solves many of the issues the NHS faces from a data utilisation standpoint by making data accessible to all. There is technology available that allows the NHS to collate its data into an integrated management system. An electronic document management system (EDMS) can provide trusts with what is, effectively, a digital library for billions of pieces of information and can facilitate digital transformation, helping to bridge the gap between the NHS’s paper past and its digital future. Using this kind of technology, trusts are able to digitise paper records and create a single source of truth that clinicians can use to leverage data and gain instant access to a patient’s medical history.
An EDMS allows hospitals to scan, categorise, and store medical records – ensuring clinicians get rapid and reliable access to vital patient information and can, ultimately, speed up and improve the patient experience. Details are readily available and records retrieved instantly at the point of care from any device and any location, driving greater efficiency from the electronic patient record (EPR) system.
This technology can also support collaboration with the opportunity of interoperability, allowing for the sharing of patient records across sites. Crucial need-to-know details, often required for urgent and in-the-moment decision-making, can be surfaced quickly – along with a far more cohesive and contextual view of the patient record – to facilitate informed and considered care plans.
Furthermore, digitisation reduces the cost of physical storage space required to house paper records. If those spaces are no longer needed, our NHS can, quite literally, continue to ‘do better with less’.
Working in this way transforms physical, unstructured, and legacy records from multiple systems into organised, searchable, and shareable content. This is a hugely significant move for our healthcare system and one that we know many trusts up and down the country are embracing. The next step? Clinicians are being given the ability to utilise all this data even more smartly.
While an interoperable system ensures data is more readily accessible to clinicians, the volume of information can often mean that compiling a treatment plan is still a time-consuming task.
Alongside the landscape’s continued digital maturing, AI-assisted search capabilities have the potential to revolutionise productivity – transforming our healthcare system from a reactive to a proactive one. Recent headlines have pointed to its ability to potentially diagnose conditions autonomously, but a more interesting facet of this technology is in its quieter ability to structure and search data intelligently – unlocking vital and actionable insights.
To implement AI effectively and reduce the potential for failure to adopt, tools must be built with the specific needs of the NHS in mind; delivering software that has been built by designers with a full appreciation and experience of how the health service operates. This will give clinicians, who may not be AI literate, an intuitive platform, within a closed system away from other AI platforms or OpenAI, protecting patient data and genuinely improving patient care.
The way the NHS utilises its data has the potential to transform how healthcare is delivered in this country. By building a framework where systems can operate interchangeably and use data intelligently, clinicians will be empowered to take decisive, proactive action for all patients. This framework allows for emerging technology to be implemented to give clinicians confidence that they’re utilising data effectively.
It is essential that the healthcare sector, including all partners and suppliers to the NHS, takes action and embraces the slight shift in mindset required to – rather than attempt to do more with less – simply, do better with less. This support will give clinicians the platform to deliver focused and better-informed patient outcomes while easing the pressures that come with reduced costs and fluctuating targets.
