One-stop shop NHS app will ‘save thousands of lives’
THE NHS app is set to become a “one stop shop” for GP appointments, prescriptions and hospital records, the Health Secretary is to announce.
Health bosses hope that three out of four eligible people will be using the app by March 2024. Currently, the app has 28 million users, around half of England’s population.
The Health Secretary is today set to launch a health strategy with data at the forefront at London Tech Week’s
Healthtech Summit, which will contain commitments to give patients greater access to and control over their data.
In it are pledges to ensure researchers can access patient data “safely and efficiently” to “close the digital divide” between the NHS and social care.
Sajid Javid is expected to hail the power of information-sharing to benefit health and social care, but also pledge to “improve trust in data” and make it easier for people to opt out, if they wish.
Mr Javid is expected to say: “We will make sure researchers and innovators [can] access data safely and efficiently.
“This country has some of the world’s best research institutes and universities, a powerhouse life-sciences sector, and a thriving healthtech industry.
“When this ingenuity meets the insight of health and care data, the opportunities are incredible.”
The strategy has a target of 75 per cent of the adult population to be registered to use the NHS app by March 2024, with the overall aim for the app to be a “one stop shop for health needs”.
It comes after the Health Secretary announced earlier this year that NHS test results will be sent directly to patients via the app. The Health Secretary also promised in February to speed up digitisation of the NHS, with 90 per cent of patient records to be held electronically by next year.
The app will also make it easier for patients to obtain their GP records, with a deadline of November to give people access to their latest health information.
Improvements to the mobile app to make it easier to request historic information including diagnosis, blood test results and vaccinations are set to be rolled out by the end of next year.
More details on the future guise of the NHS app are set to be announced later this year in the Digital Health Plan.
Prof Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said the strategy “genuinely will save many thousands of lives every year”.
He said: “This data strategy provides the framework that will allow our data assets to be productively used, enhancing all aspects of care.”
Prof Ben Goldacre, director of the Bennett Institute at the University of Oxford, called the strategy “momentous” and said the data the NHS holds has “phenomenal untapped power”.