Is it realistic for us all to quickly switch to this new way of booking appointments?

6 January 2025, 18:45

The government is on-track for patients to change or cancel their hospital appointments – 85% of hospitals in England will have this by March.

This enhances the existing GP appointment booking and GP medical records in the NHS App.

NHS England’s approach ensures that there is a clear offering for patients - just go to the App and everything that the NHS has bought is available through it. 

This then enables NHS England to assemble the best solutions from the private sector, scaling the solutions that work. 

This is better than many other countries which we compared in our book, Personal Health Records for Governments (www.phr4gov.org).

Many have gone the route of the Danish government building an app in-house that has limited features and future.

At the other extreme, the US government builds nothing, leading to fragmentation and confusion for the US consumer.

England’s way enables experimentation with technology companies and scale with the NHS’s buying power. Recent announcements also included providing patients with their test results from hospitals.

This technology is already working, with hospitals in North London showing over two million test results in the NHS App every week.

Switching this on universally requires six months of lead time for each hospital to configure the correct clinical protocol with many hospitals already enabled or on track to do so.

So it’s doable quickly, and in parallel, for national equity.

In Sussex, releasing test results to patients with prostate cancer reduced follow up hospital appointments.

Test results reduced 75% of hospital appointments for skin disease patients in Swansea Bay.

Offering a choice of hospitals requires new work. The NHS App must show the choices, including explaining the difference between these hospitals.

The hospitals must make the differences transparent, and their IT systems must cope with the choice. No private hospital has yet integrated with the NHS App.

More critical than the appointment administration is the medical record moving with the patient across all the hospitals.

This reduces costs for the hospital (avoiding reordering test results) and increases safety for the patient (showing current diagnoses and medications). And the data must move back from the hospital with the patient.

Digital is a key solution for the NHS’s capacity problems as it is lower cost and faster speed to deploy.

It gives the government time and cash for the higher cost longer-term solutions that are also necessary in its 10-year plan.

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Mohammad Al-Ubaydli is the Founder and CEO of digital health app Patients Know Best

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