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More tech funding is coming, promises NHS England’s chief clinical information officer
NHS England’s CCIO says details on funding for NHS tech will be announced in a month’s time, and will shift focus to community and primary care
NHS technology funding will shift away from being given primarily to secondary care hospitals, Alex Price-Forbes, NHS England’s chief clinical information officer (CCIO), has said.
Speaking at the Digital Health Rewired conference in Birmingham, Price-Forbes said that funding details are likely to be announced in a month’s time, and will give providers more ownership of how to spend the money.
“For the last 10-15 years, we’ve focused relentlessly on pouring 95% of the money into hospitals, and that’s got to change,” he said.
“The funding will be focused very much far more on the non-acute settings, community settings, and we will also give more ownership and power to local providers, organisations and integrated care boards to spend that money.”
This comes after concerns were raised after the 2025 Budget that the funding promised for the NHS was too restrictive, focusing on the big wins, such as the NHS App and the Federated Data Platform.
Price-Forbes also said that while the NHS has done “lots of digitisation”, turning paper processes digital, this needs to stop.
“We’ve got to reimagine how we deliver care,” he said. “And that’s enabled both by a new business model, but also really focusing on an enterprise architecture supported by digital and data architecture. That does not just mean digitising what we’re doing on paper and learning some AI [artificial intelligence] to reduce the administrative burden. It means strategically and purposefully redesigning how we do things.”
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Price-Forbes added that there has already been “huge amounts of money” spent on technology, and “we can’t just rip and replace”, but rather focus on optimisation.
A key part of the NHS 10-year plan is its digitally enabled Neighbourhood Health Service, which will allow people to use the NHS App to communicate with healthcare professionals, as well as moving care out of hospitals and into neighbourhood health centres.
The government will also replace two-thirds of outpatient appointments with automated information and digital AI-enabled advice, aiming to save the £14bn a year currently spent on outpatient appointments.
Primary care is central to the NHS’s ambition to deliver more preventative, community-based care, but resources are scarce.
GPs face increasing expectations, including expanded digital access and population health management responsibilities, without corresponding increases in funding or capacity.
Price-Forbes said the centre recognises the persistent pressures and operational frustrations frontline staff in the NHS are facing. “Our strategic role now is to help support and guide the system through a period of fundamental reform, ensuring digital by default becomes the approach to designing, delivering and improving care,” he said, adding that the 10-year plan, when it becomes an “operational reality”, will do this.
“The future success of the NHS lies in harnessing everything the age of digital data, improvement science and innovation have to offer for the benefit of patients, staff and communities.”
