Empowering UK citizens as stewards of their own care

Summary

• The NHS has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to launch a fully integrated, AI-powered national health app that proactively engages citizens, closes care gaps, and improves outcomes.
• A connected, citizen-centric digital ecosystem — powered by interoperable data, intelligent care guidance, and self-service tools — can shift UK healthcare from sickness to prevention.
• By combining technology, behavioural change, and collaboration across public and private sectors, the UK can empower citizens as active stewards of their health while improving access, equity, and efficiency.

At League, we believe the future of healthcare must be personalised, proactive, and radically accessible—built around people and data, not just processes. The National Health Service (NHS), with its deep-rooted commitment to universality and sustainability, stands at an opportune moment – one that could redefine what’s possible in public health not just in the UK, but globally.

Wes Streeting recently spoke of the urgent need to modernise the NHS so “it’s there for us when we need it, not just when we’re ill”. That’s exactly the future we believe is within reach.

By embracing a digitally-driven model of care, the NHS has a once in a generation opportunity to launch the world’s first national health app that is truly proactive – not reactive – and makes key recommendations and provides relevant insights and support when needed. Always on. Always learning. Always working in the background to help people live healthier, happier lives. 

We have had the opportunity to engage with NHS leadership, and it’s clear that the team driving this transformation is truly best-in-class with a real vision for how best to leverage technology to improve access, equity, quality and efficiency. Work is already well-underway. And if successful, the NHS could become the first health system in the world to put an intelligent, proactive, and fully integrated AI healthcare companion into every citizen’s pocket.

This is more than a technology project – it’s a new model for care. One that connects services across public and private sectors, and turns data and insights into meaningful action, and empowers citizens as stewards of their own health – a vision powerfully articulated by the NHS 10-year plan.

Our experience building a digital health engagement platform shows us that care is care – whether it’s delivered virtually or in person, what matters most is guiding people forward on their health journey. We also believe that the UK has a unique opportunity to lead the world in making that journey continuous, connected, citizen-first, and enabled by AI.

To complement the strategic shifts in the NHS’s “Fit for the Future” plan — moving from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention — we propose a next-gen digital solution designed for the AI age. This solution is truly connected and citizen-centric. It is built to leverage significant investments in data infrastructure, like the Federated Data Platform (FDP), to enable targeted interventions, personalised health journeys, and a focus on adherence and compliance, ultimately closing care gaps and improving access and equity.

Four Steps to Empowering the Citizen Steward

From Silos to Seamless Care: Unlocking the Power of UK Health Data

The UK healthcare experience needs to move toward a more comprehensive individual health journey, and data is the key. Both the “Fit for the Future” 10-year plan and Wes Streeting’s proposals recognize this challenge, with a shared goal of moving the NHS from an analogue to a digital system. They envision a future where secure, seamless, and citizen-controlled data exchange is a reality. The Federated Data Platform (FDP) is a major step in this direction, providing a crucial unlock for patient-facing applications that can harness this data and turn it into relevant, actionable health insights.

• Connecting the Care Continuum: While robust, mandatory interoperability standards have been part of the UK’s health strategy, the challenge lies in their effective implementation to create a comprehensive and bidirectional flow of information across all certified health IT systems. This is crucial for integrating services and ensuring that, for instance, community pharmacies can link to a single patient record, creating a truly connected care ecosystem.
• Putting Patients in Control: A key theme in both the 10-year plan and Streeting’s proposals is putting patients in control of their health through meaningful insights. The strategy moves beyond simple access to medical records and focuses on the aggregation and interpretation of a patient’s complete health data — including medical records, pharmacy information, and data from wearables. By applying AI to this comprehensive dataset, patients are provided with actionable clinical insights, which truly empowers them to play a more active role in their own care.
• A National Blueprint: A national, reliable directory of providers and healthcare organisations is critical for accurate referrals and efficient data routing, ensuring citizens can easily find the right care within a more integrated system. This aligns with the push for a Neighbourhood Health Service, which requires a clear understanding of all available local resources.

Beyond the Clinic: Embracing a Holistic Approach to UK Health and Wellness

Healthcare is no longer limited to the four walls of the clinic, and has expanded into people’s homes, retail experiences, and on their personal devices. That means they have the opportunity to interact with their health on a regular basis, and with the right information get the care they need when they need it, often before a condition becomes problematic. Both the “Fit for the Future” plan and Wes Streeting’s proposals explicitly state a major shift “from sickness to prevention.” This involves fully integrating allied health professionals, pharmacists, therapists, and digital health tools into the care continuum to meet citizens where they are. Initiatives like the NHS App are seen as key to achieving this goal, with senior leaders viewing it as central to the shift towards prevention and wellness.

• Empowering Frontline Care: Policies should support and incentivise the seamless integration of services from pharmacists, nurses, therapists, and other allied health professionals into digital care pathways. The “Fit for the Future” plan, through its Neighbourhood Health Service model, aims to increase investment in out-of-hospital care and make care happen as locally as possible, including in a patient’s home or a Neighbourhood Health Centre (NHC).
• Enabling a Proactive Approach: Solutions like digital therapeutics, remote monitoring, and wellness programmes should be seamlessly integrated into patient care plans. Streeting’s proposals note that technologies like AI and machine learning offer the chance to transform the healthcare system to one that can not only diagnose and treat, but also predict and prevent illness. The data from these tools should flow back to the central health record to inform providers and patients, enabling the system to be more proactive.
• Shifting from Sickness to Wellness: The system must shift towards proactive and preventive care models, moving beyond episodic treatment to continuous health engagement facilitated by technology. The “Fit for the Future” plan sets out a goal to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between rich and poor regions through a “huge cross-societal energy on prevention.” This approach is essential for addressing population growth and illness before it becomes critical, aligning with the core tenets of NHS’ goals.

The Next-Gen Digital Front Door: Self-Service Solutions for a Modernized NHS

The Achilles Heel for virtual care is continuity of care. Today’s digital experiences are often transactional and disconnected, preventing the ongoing, continuous care journeys that are so vital. For example, a patient might receive a broad recommendation instead of a referral to a trusted doctor they’ve seen before. The NHS App is poised to become the “full front door” for this new era of healthcare, as mentioned in the “Fit for the Future” plan. Empowering individuals with self-service capabilities through a unified digital front door is key to improving engagement and reducing administrative burden. The NHS 10-year plan aims for 95% of people with complex needs to have an agreed care plan by 2027, with the NHS App supporting self-referral and communication. The digital front door can help reduce the asymmetry of information between the health system and the patient by including features like personal care companions and health journeys.

• A Unified Entry Point: Every individual should have a unified, personalised digital entry point to the healthcare system, such as an enhanced NHS App. This “digital front door” should provide intuitive access to appointments, health information, prescription refills, and communication with care teams, allowing people to manage their care as easily as they bank or shop online.
• Intelligent Care Guidance: The digital front door should provide intelligent guidance for navigating the complex healthcare system, helping individuals find appropriate care, understand their options, and connect with resources. Streeting’s “ping and book” service for breast and cervical cancer checks is an example of an intelligent, self-service solution. Leveraging data and user preferences, digital platforms should offer personalised care navigation, content, and proactive nudges that engage individuals in managing their health. Streeting’s proposals state that the NHS must modernize to meet the needs of citizens who are accustomed to “choice, voice, ease and convenience at the touch of a button.” Personal care companions, made possible by agentic AI solutions, make this a reality, and shift care from reactive to preventive.
• Secure, Self-Service Access for All: To facilitate convenient and secure access, the UK needs a flexible digital identity infrastructure, supporting various digital identity methods while ensuring citizens retain control over their data. Empowering citizens to own their health journeys also shifts many administrative tasks to self-service digital channels, which enables healthcare organisations to reduce operational costs and allows staff to focus on direct patient care. This can be further enhanced through automation and orchestration of care, streamlining the entire system.

Smart Care, Better Outcomes: Using AI to Personalise UK Healthcare

Artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense potential to revolutionise healthcare by enabling personalised care at scale and driving proactive wellness. AI’s ability to process and interpret vast amounts of data is critical for delivering the individualised experiences that citizens have come to expect in other sectors and that would deliver enormous value to the NHS. The “Fit for the Future” plan has an ambition to make the NHS the “most AI-enabled care system in the world,” with all hospitals being fully AI-enabled within the lifetime of the plan.

• From Data to Actionable Insights: AI can analyse vast datasets to identify health risks, predict potential issues, and offer personalised recommendations for preventive care and lifestyle adjustments. Beyond this it can surface the right intervention and the right time and make recommendations actionable when served up to citizens digitally.
•  AI-Powered Care Teams: AI tools can support care teams across the care continuum by summarising patient data, highlighting critical information, and automating routine tasks, addressing labour constraints and freeing up healthcare professionals to focus on direct patient interactions. This includes opportunities to drive citizen action through AI-powered recommendations and delegate routine outreach to AI agents and supports orchestration of care.
•  Building Trust and Ensuring Equity: As AI adoption grows, clear guidelines for ethical use, governance, data privacy, and algorithmic transparency are essential to build trust and ensure equitable outcomes.

A New Era of Collaboration and Behavioural Transformation

This is no longer solely about digital transformation. Instead, it’s about behavioural transformation powered by digital. The NHS is working to position citizens as the stewards of their own healthcare. This means moving beyond a pull strategy – where individuals only seek care when acutely ill – to a proactive push, engaging citizens to be active participants in managing their own health and wellness to drive better outcomes and greater efficiency. This approach is vital to address the strained public sector system and the growing private health sector in the UK, fostering collaboration to tackle issues like surgical backlogs.

By focusing on citizen engagement and fostering synergy within the NHS, the UK can build a more integrated and intelligent health technology ecosystem. Our approach, which aligns with the new 10-year plan, proposes a digital solution to better engage citizens and coordinate all levels of NHS care. This will help drive down costs and raise engagement, ultimately reducing waste and improving outcomes for all citizens. We are committed to collaborating with the NHS to help realize this vision for a healthier future for the UK.