The 10-Year Plan: What Might a Full Shift to Digital Mean for the NHS?

That journey is already underway, marked by three interconnected shifts: from treatment to prevention, from hospitals to community-based care, and from analogue processes to digital-first delivery. Each represents a reimagining of how care is accessed, coordinated, and sustained. The challenge now is turning these shifts from ambition into reality—ensuring they are not just aspirations, but embedded ways of working across the health and social care system.

Over the past decade, the NHS has made significant strides in digital innovation. Electronic prescribing has become the norm, with nearly 90% of prescriptions now processed digitally. The NHS App has empowered more than 34 million people to access their health information, book appointments and order repeat prescriptions with ease. And virtual wards—once considered experimental—are now supporting patients across England, with over 10,000 virtual beds in place as of early 2024.

These are not isolated achievements. They reflect a broader cultural and operational shift across health and social care. Today, one in five NHS organisations is considered digitally mature—evidence that investment, leadership and collaboration are beginning to pay off.

Looking ahead, the NHS 10 Year Plan is expected to build on existing digital approaches to preventative care—scaling proven tools like remote monitoring and wearables to reach more people, more consistently.

One of the more ambitious proposals is the introduction of standardised “patient passports,” giving professionals secure, instant access to a person’s complete medical history, wherever they receive care. Alongside this, reforms to clinical research aim to reduce trial setup times and improve access to anonymised NHS data, accelerating medical innovation while safeguarding public trust.

If delivered at scale, these measures could ease pressure on frontline services, speed up the discovery of new treatments, and embed a more proactive, personalised model of care across the NHS.

At this year’s Digital Health Rewired 2025, the keynote session on the Digital Transformation stage made it clear that digital needs to move from a programme to a mindset. Sonia Patel, Director of Levelling Up Digital at NHS England, captured this shift, noting: “We’ve got to stop doing digital to people. It’s about being digital—embedding it in the way we think, plan, and act.”

The focus, increasingly, is on embedding what works. Helen Thomas, CEO of Digital Health and Care Wales, reminded the audience that “We’ve had the shiny tools—we need solid foundations.” That includes everything from data infrastructure to governance, alongside the softer systems of culture and collaboration.

Ming Tang, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at NHS England, reinforced the importance of interoperability, warning that “There is no future for a fragmented data ecosystem. National must enable local, not control it.” The goal is not to centralise transformation, but to create the conditions that allow it to scale locally.

These reflections align closely with what many hope to see in the forthcoming 10-year health plan: a greater emphasis on joining up services and empowering systems to deliver care in ways that reflect local needs. If the plan succeeds in setting clear expectations for interoperability, providing long-term digital leadership and investing in foundational capabilities, it could turn this shared mindset into measurable, system-wide progress.

That shift must also prioritise removing friction and integrating care. Too often, care is delayed or duplicated because data doesn’t flow, systems don’t speak to each other, or teams don’t share a single source of truth. The next phase of digital transformation must focus on building a truly connected NHS—one where information is timely, secure and shared across settings to support joined-up care.

Recent strategy documents point to real progress on this front. NHS England’s Digitise, Connect, Transform roadmap sets out a goal for all NHS trusts to have core electronic patient records in place by March 2025, providing a critical foundation for integration. Plans to expand the Shared Care Records programme and develop federated data platforms are also designed to ensure professionals have access to the right information at the right time—whether in hospital, in the community, or at home.

Reducing these invisible barriers isn’t just a technical upgrade—it’s key to improving outcomes, avoiding unnecessary interventions, and ensuring every patient journey feels coherent, no matter where or how they access care.

The NHS workforce—1.4 million strong—is at the heart of any digital transformation. As new technologies become more embedded in care delivery, ensuring staff are confident and capable in using them is critical. Digital literacy is improving, but the pace of innovation means ongoing investment is essential. Programmes led by NHS England and Health Education England are already working to build capability, from leadership to frontline care.​

AI in healthcare is a fast-emerging area of opportunity as well. In February 2025, the UK government announced £82.6 million in research funding for projects harnessing AI to diagnose and treat cancer. This includes £18.9 million for PharosAI, a collaboration between King’s College London, Queen Mary University of London, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, and Barts Health NHS Trust, aiming to develop AI models for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, £12.9 million was allocated to Bind Research to use AI in targeting previously undruggable proteins, potentially leading to new treatments for diseases once considered untreatable.

AI is already being adopted across many parts of the NHS, from diagnostics to operational planning. But scaling its impact system-wide will depend on the quality of data, seamless system integration, and a workforce equipped to use it with confidence. Early steps are already underway, with NHS England and partners developing AI capability frameworks and digital training resources to support staff in adapting to new technologies. Crucially, as the use of such solutions expands, AI must remain ethical, safe and transparent in its development and deployment—ensuring public trust is protected as innovation progresses.

The 10-Year Plan is expected to build on this momentum—ensuring teams and organisations are not only able to use new tools, but to apply them in ways that genuinely improve care and patient outcomes.

As digital becomes the default in health and social care, inclusion must be intentional. An estimated 10 million adults in the UK still lack basic digital skills, and around 7% of households remain offline—barriers that risk excluding some of the very people who need services most. Without action, digital transformation could widen health inequalities rather than reduce them.

The NHS has already acknowledged this challenge through frameworks focused on digital inclusion, and partnerships with libraries and local organisations are helping to improve access, skills and confidence. But there’s more to do—especially at scale.

The 10-Year Plan offers a critical opportunity to embed inclusion into the design of future services. That means supporting tailored access, offering offline alternatives and recognising that non-digital can be exclusionary too. Many people—especially those with mental health challenges—feel more comfortable engaging through digital tools than speaking on the phone. Giving people real options allows more people to access care in a way that works for them. And where digital can safely serve 80%, staff have more capacity to support the 20% who need face-to-face help the most.

The 10-Year Plan arrives into a system that is not starting from scratch—but one that needs support to finish what it has started. Across the UK, providers are showing what’s possible when transformation is rooted in relationships, clarity and consistency. The NHS is already a digital organisation in many respects; now, it needs policy continuity to turn that presence into confidence.

If the last decade was about showing how digital could work, the next must be about making it work for everyone. The plan may not yet be published, but the intent is already visible—through the priorities being voiced, the leadership being shaped, and the progress being made.

This is no longer about going digital; it’s about delivering care in a world where digital is already here.