The NHS in 2030 - A People-Powered and Knowledge-Powered Health System

The NHS
in 2030
A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED,
KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM
Jessica Bland, Halima Khan, John Loder,
Tom Symons and Stian Westlake
JULY
2015
THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was written by Jessica Bland,
Halima Khan, John Loder, Tom Symons and
Stian Westlake.
Many thanks to: Lydia Nicholas for helping
write and develop the stories; Jullie Tran
Graham for helping with some of the initial
research for Sections 3 and 4; Helen Kay
and Sir John Chisholm for their help with
information on Precision Medicine, as well
as colleagues at NHS England and the

Department of Health; Michael Hallsworth
and Hannah Burd from the Behavioural
Insights Team. The Academy of Medical
Sciences policy team offered invaluable
insight into the emerging discussions on the
relationship between stratified medicine and
personalised services.
We would like to thank the following
people for giving up their time to help us
understand the signals of change today and
what these could lead to in the future:
Richard Barker, The Precision

Medicine Catapult
Chris Drinkwater, Ways to

Wellness
Jenny Barnett, Cambridge

Cognition
Kevin Fong
Fran Bennett, Mastodon C

Ewan Birney, EMBLEuropean
Bioinformatics Institute
Angela Coulter, Kings Fund
Visiting Fellow
Andrew Cozens CBE, Acainn
Ben Jupp, Social Finance

Dr Steven Laitner, GP and
Freelance Health Consultant
Neil Lawrence, University of
Sheffield
Max Little, Wellcome Trust/MIT
Fellow, Aston University
Richard Murray, Kings Fund

Nadim Matta, Rapid Results
Institute
Dr Stephen Richards, Care
Quality Commission
Adrian Sieff, The Health
Foundation
Mustafa Suleyman, Google
DeepMind
Ruth Thorlby, Nuffield Trust
Alisha Davies, Nuffield Trust
Nick Loman, University of

Birmingham
Julia Wilson, Wellcome Trust

Sanger Institute
Icons for each of the sections were

provided under Creative Commons
licenses. Some were provided under a
public domain license.
Section 2 icon credit: Knowledge

Transfer by Duke Innovation Co-Lab via
the Noun Project CC0 1.0
Section 4 icon credit: Big Idea by

Edward Boatman via the Noun Project
CC0 1.0
Section 3 icon credit: Community Health

Advocate by Edward Boatman via the
Noun Project CC0 1.0
The Shape of the NHS in 2030 section

icon credit: Architect by Luis Prado via
The Noun Project CC BY 3.0
Section 1 icon credit: Digital Health by

pepf via The Noun Project CC BY 3.0
Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and

organisations bring great ideas to life.
We are dedicated to supporting ideas that can help improve all our lives,
with activities ranging from earlystage investment to indepth research
and practical programmes.
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www.nesta.org.uk
Nesta 2015
The NHS
in 2030
A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED,
KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM
CONTENTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. PRECISION MEDICINE
10
2. A HEALTH KNOWLEDGE COMMONS
16
3. HEALTH BY AND WITH THE PEOPLE
21
4. TAKING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR SERIOUSLY
26
THE SHAPE OF THE NHS IN 2030
31
WHAT CHALLENGES LIE ALONG THE WAY?
33
WHAT COULD BE DONE NOW?
36
CONCLUSION 46

Executive Summary
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report offers a vision for the NHS in the mediumterm future.
Most discussions of the future of the NHS have at most a fiveyear horizon. They generally
begin with a familiar and foreboding list of challenges. An older population with more
longterm illnesses and increasing expectations will be expensive to look after. Healthcare
productivity has stagnated and further efficiency savings are hard to find. Drug costs are
rising. Public funding for health is under more pressure than ever.
These are all serious challenges for the near future. But the longer term, specifically the run
up to 2030, could offer more hope. The NHS has the opportunity to take advantage of two
powerful and underexploited sources of innovation that have the potential to make care
better and, under the right circumstances, cheaper. These are the rapidly accelerating pace of
digital technology, and the power of social innovation.
The report explores how these two trends could make the NHS and the wider health system
better. It focuses on four specific changes. Two developments involve harnessing the power of
knowledge to improve care.
1. Improvements in digital technologies enable, on the one hand, an explosion in the use of
personalised medicine, underpinned by genomics.
2. New digital technologies also allow people to track and analyse their own health data, and
to share this and other health knowledge with others in ways that will aid prevention and
management of longterm illnesses.
Two developments making better use of the power of people.
3. Social innovation is the key to a revolution in how people are involved in their own care
and that of others, improving the quality of care.
4. New insights into human behaviour will improve clinical quality and make it easier for
people to lead healthy lifestyles.
This is not to say that there will not be other innovations in healthcare in the coming 15
years: medical science will of course advance, new drugs and devices will be developed, and
management practices will evolve. Any future strategy for the health service will need to make
the most of these too. It will also need to address headon issues like the relationship between
how services are designed and inequalities in the health of the UK population. Tackling public
health issues like obesity will need sustained engagement with the food and drink industry
and new approaches to regulation.
This report concentrates on opportunities that Nesta can see coming into focus through our
programmes, research and partnerships. Even so, nothing about the future is certain; these
innovations have much to prove if they are to have the positive effect on healthcare that we
hope they will challenges that we explore later in the report.

Executive Summary
Despite these uncertainties, we believe that people power and knowledge power have an
unusually important contribution to make to healthcare in the UK in the coming 15 years. It
is one that is sometimes neglected in ongoing debate over the NHS of the future. There are
champions for both among health service leaders, pioneering practitioners and a burgeoning
community of digital health entrepreneurs. But the potential of people and knowledge power
has not yet been absorbed into mainstream media and political debates about healthcare.
The future that this report focuses on may seem far off. Fifteen years extends well beyond the
current NHS Five Year Forward View, and for that matter beyond the lives of this and the next
Parliament. But preparing for a radically different future requires us to start now. The time to
think about the potential of knowledge, power and people power is now. Making the most of
people power and knowledge power will require longterm changes in practices, attitudes and
behaviours; investments will take time to pay off. If these investments are not made, there is
the risk that the NHS will become increasingly unsustainable, even if its nearterm challenges
are mitigated.
We hope this report, and the possible future that it envisages, will encourage this investment
to happen now, rather than postponing until it is too late.
Innovation, technology and the future of the NHS

History shows that major new technologies, from the steam engine to the shipping container
can change the world: but not on their own. They only deliver significant benefits when
people redesign how they work, and sometimes even how they live, to make the most of
them.
Factories were redesigned to take advantage of distributed electric power. Containerisation
came into its own when companies developed new international supply chains based on the
cheap transport it allowed. Effective vaccination necessitated the development of public
health systems and campaigns. In each case, what changed the world was not just an isolated
technology, but also the imaginative leaps necessary to make the most of it.
The NHS is the product of a wide range of technologies: centuries of accumulated medical
science and clinical breakthroughs; decades of pharmaceutical research; and the political and
managerial innovations required to set it up and then to run it.
But information technology and social innovation remain underexploited by todays NHS.
This is because of the steady rise of two trends. The rapid advance of digital technology has
been driven by the inexorable advance of computing power and connectivity over the last
half century. This enables a system like the NHS to make much better use of the power of
knowledge to help patients, and to help them help themselves.
Alongside this, the world has seen a flourishing of social innovation. Governments and
citizens have in the last two decades come to realise that social movements can tackle wicked
problems that governments find hard to address. At its heart, social innovation involves
harnessing the power of people patients, carers, communities and citizens to improve
health.
These two trends mean that knowledge and people will be increasingly valuable assets for
the NHS in the future. Digital technologies make knowledge easier to create: for example,
through genome sequencing, routine gathering of biological and behavioural data, or curation
of patients knowledge and insights. Social innovation multiplies the power of volunteers,
engaged patients and communities.

Executive Summary
We need a system built from todays signature technologies

not the signature technologies of the 20th century.
Buildings that provide electricity and people with knowledge
will become software and computational power with
intelligence in the cloud. And products become services
tailored to you, your genes and your behaviour... Things are
changing from buildings, people and products to software,
services and mobile devices.
Andrew Thompson, Proteus Digital Health, Refilling the Innovators Prescription
Of course, information and citizen action have always had a role to play in healthcare, albeit
a supporting one. Selfcare has long been recognised in terms of remembering to take
medicine or managing physical fitness. At least two transformational health movements
hospices and first aid were social innovations then coopted by official health systems. The
NHS has sought to incorporate expert patients into its models of care since the 2000s. On the
information side, data on the geography of a cholera outbreak in 1854 led to one of the first
local authority public health interventions. The NHS patient number system means that the
UK can make decisions about improvement to healthcare based on some of the most detailed
health statistics in the world from morbidity to prescribing data.
But the immense and growing power of digital technology and the renaissance of social
innovation suggest that both these trends have much more to offer. This paper is an attempt
to imagine what the health system might look like in 15 years time, if these innovations are
fully adopted and the NHS reconfigured around them.
Why 2030?
In an age of strained budgets and regular crises, thinking about what happens in 15 years time
may seem frivolous. But when major technological changes are afoot, it is often impossible to
understand them without lifting your eyes at least briefly to the horizon.
Thinking freely about the faroff future helps identify changes that may not be urgent today,
but could be the beginning of something important. This is not a matter of predicting the
most likely advancements. Useful futures projects think creatively about the kinds of services
that could be developed based on trends, technologies and movements visible today.

Executive Summary
2030 Vision for the UKs health system

Each section in this paper deals with a different aspect of a 2030 health system powered by
more people and new kinds of knowledge. But what do the four parts look like when theyre
put together?
By 2030, precise and rich information about patients means that medical
researchers better understand how complex factors interact at an individual
level. A stronger data infrastructure linking doctors and researchers means that
genetic and other biological data, as well as daytoday behavioural data, is part
of decisionmaking in the clinic. (Section 1)
Selfmonitoring technology will be ubiquitous, and used by many to monitor

their health. Digital patient portals mean that healthcare is truly personalised
offering people the chance to build their own interaction with the clinic. There
are also digitallyreinforced public forums for health discussion, where anyone
can engage in debates about health issues and challenge standard practices.
There will be a much greater understanding among the public about the benefits
and challenges of sharing data. There will be ways for this social movement to
reach inside the NHS, and for traditional services to find a way to take on board
new kinds of expertise. (Section 2)
People will have much greater opportunity to help themselves and others
achieve a healthy life. They will be better supported by the NHS to do this.
Healthcare professionals will work with people to identify emotional and practical
support as well as clinical treatments. Volunteers and nonclinical staff will
support people to maintain healthy behaviours and access more than medicine
services such as peer support networks. Millions of people will be mobilised to
volunteer in the community and formal health services. (Section 3)
Policymakers will need to take seriously the design of health interventions and
treatment, as a powerful influence on the uptake of healthy behaviours. Through
understanding behavioural insights, the design of many things from city centres
to medicine packaging will go with the grain of the rest of peoples lives.
Healthcare will not take place in isolation, but via a flexible set of services that
makes it easy for people to live healthy lives. This may include making it easier
for people to undertake exercise and eat well. Health professionals will be better
at tailoring treatment and intervention in response to a patients lifestyle and
changing condition. (Section 4)
New services have replaced or changed todays institutes of care. Personalised

care will be best provided by a frontline that can adapt and respond to patients
needs and expectations. Staff will help patients to create integrated pathways
that embed specialist input. They will also have opportunities to experiment with
changing the services they provide, through structured schemes for problem
solving and trialling new interventions. (The shape of the NHS in 2030)

Executive Summary
A financially sustainable NHS

The primary motivation for delivering this kind of health system should be improved
healthcare outcomes. But there could also be significant financial gains. These changes could
address three drivers of increasing healthcare costs: demands on primary and acute care,
expensive but sophisticated treatments and management of longterm conditions.
As with most transformational innovations, these financial benefits are not guaranteed.
Communityled care and information technology have had a mixed record of driving cost
improvements in the NHS. Their ability to make the health service financially sustainable is
dependent on six factors:
Selfmanagement and peer support must translate into reduced demand for primary and
acute care services. This would mean people are confident and knowledgeable about their
conditions and this reduces exacerbations. They know that data they collect will lead to
an alert if they need medical attention. They would visit primary care less and have fewer
emergency admissions. Discharge would be quicker for those that do have a hospital stay.
Greater personal responsibility for health must result in the prevention of people developing
lifestylerelated health problems. This would also reduce the need for health services and
would take some of the pressure off the cost of prescriptions and the need for treatments.
There would be wider economic benefits from a healthier population, such as fewer work days
lost to sickness.
Precision medicine improves the efficiency and impact of treatment. Precision medicine
can increase costs by increasing diagnoses and extending the scope and range of possible
treatments available. It also has the potential to reduce costs through efficiency gains,
such as reducing the use of ineffective treatments or medications. Better understanding of
disease could prevent the expensive complications that come with late diagnosis, delayed or
ineffective treatments.
Research will be more quickly translated into treatment. Drug development today is
expensive and can take decades to reach patients. Far more accurately targeted treatment
development and regulatory processes would permit a number of steps to be executed in
parallel. This could cut almost an order of magnitude out of the time to market, permitting
lower prices.
Changes to services must result in sustained reductions in errors and increases in
effectiveness. These changes include redesigning interactions, communication, equipment
and systems in a way which takes better account of the influences on peoples decision
making. This could impact multiple aspects of health expenditure, through fewer missed
appointments, misdiagnoses, inappropriate referrals and prescriptions, and better adherence
to medical treatment.
This must be done at scale. Efforts so far have largely tinkered at the edges of mainstream
activity. At such limited scale it is very difficult to fundamentally change expensive legacy
systems. Only once changes are at a greater scale will it be possible to reduce the need for
expensive buildings or services. The benefits of specialist care centres, provided for patients
with similar symptoms will only be realised when these become the basis for healthcare
provision.

Structure of the report
Structure of the report

This report explores four big ways that knowledge power and people power will affect the
NHS in 2030 and the wider health system, through precision medicine, new forms of health
data, peoplepowered health, and the use of behavioural insights.
The reports first four sections cover each of these big changes in turn. They include
descriptions of three characters who come into regular contact with health services. Allie
is under five with a stayathome dad living in a city centre. Bhakti is in her 50s and has
diabetes. She has a teenage daughter with physical disabilities and a lot of demands on her
time. Colin is in his 70s. His physical health is starting to deteriorate due to age, and his wife
recently passed away.
Each section then describes the landscape of services and initiatives that might exist in 2030
to enable these experiences, as well as some signals of change from activities today.
New knowledge used differently

Section 1 concentrates on where new kinds of medical information about individuals will come
from, as well as how it is interpreted in stratified care. Section 2 moves onto people managing
their own health information and new digital platforms for supporting patientled research
and care.
More people managing health

Section 3 looks at the possibility of a social movement for health: people being trusted to
have a more active role in their own health and to look after others, supported by the NHS,
as well as people supporting health services. Section 4 explores how insights into human
behaviours can help us to redesign health services, products and treatments in a way that
reflects better how people live their lives and make choices.
This is followed by a summary of how this will change the function of the NHS (The Shape of
the NHS in 2030). The final sections focus on the challenges involved in getting to the best
version of this future (What challenges lie along the way?) and ideas for how these changes
can be supported today (What could be done now?). Concentrating on the widest gaps
between these ideas and current policy, the Conclusion includes four proposals that would
support new functions in the health system:
A. Digital platforms and widely agreed

protocols for developing new kinds of
health knowledge and responding to
the latent demand for taking part in
healthcare. These should make clear
the role of new kinds of knowledge
relative to the biomedical model of
human health. This needs to support
deliberation and negotiation over what is
useful for improving health.
B. P
rototypes for health data sharing that
concentrate on understanding emerging
attitudes to digital privacy. These could
focus on specific products and services.
But should be used as a testing ground
for developing publically legitimate
governance of health data.
C. An institution that supports and

evaluates People Powered Health
research. This starts to build an NHS that
works as a natural laboratory. It should
be easier for frontline staff to experiment
with the way they run their services,
whether this is adopting behavioural
insights or troubleshooting systemic
issues.
D. A central institution to set standards and
mandate processes that will maximise
the clinical and research value of large
genomic and other data sets as they
become available. The institution will
probably be the best place to take
responsibility for data best managed at a
national level.
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1. Precision Medicine
1. PRECISION MEDICINE
New knowledge used differently: medical information about individuals

and its interpretation into stratified care
Allies parents decided they wanted to know more about their daughters health. They signed
her up to the national whole genome sequencing trial from birth. Ten million people in the
UK have now had their genome sequenced; one million of these were done at birth as part of
this national research project. As the longitudinal study has only been running for a decade,
most of the research it has produced so far is about new treatments for rare diseases in
young children. Allies grandmother reads up on genome sequencing study eagerly, and sends
articles to Allies parents. Allies father appreciates this, but has decided to give his mother
only limited access to the studys participant portal: she can see the discoveries that Allies
data donation contributed to, but not Allies full genetic sequence and uptodate risk profile.
Allies father attended a prenatal course on precision care for young children. The local
nurse practitioner explained a range of molecularlevel monitoring options. He chose the
longitudinal genomic study because of the early diagnosis and extra access to preventative
care it provides. He could have also requested homemonitoring for protein and transcripts
in Allies blood. But he wasnt interested in using this kit just yet, and so just signed up to a
newsletter about scientific developments in the area. High levels of noise and air pollution on
their street qualify them for household sensors, and access to support systems for recording
changes in Allies sleep patterns and lung capacity. At age two, her lung capacity stops
increasing at the usual rate an early signal that she might have asthma.
Bhakti is grateful that when her physically disabled daughter was young and struggled
to communicate they had access to ingestible sensors. These often alerted her to a high
temperature or an episode of acid reflux before it was externally visible, and Bhakti and
her daughters doctors could precisely track the impact of medications on her metabolic
problems. Over time the data produced a hugely detailed portrait of the conditions
progression and the impact of different treatments. Bhakti refused to share the data until
her daughter could participate in the decision. They recently discussed the issue. Bhaktis
daughter is concerned because her condition is so rare that this intimate information about
her body might be traced to her, but wants to help others too. They have scheduled an online
conversation with a data technician to discuss possibilities.
Every evening Colin provides a blood sample to the overnight proteomics monitoring system
by his bed and every morning he checks the results. He always looks first at the levels
of a protein that can develop into a plaque at the base of the brain, causing Alzheimers
disease. This data is fed back into a national research database, which is used to improve
understanding of the early biological signals of cognitive impairment.
Colin has an activitymonitoring system, reminding him if he forgets to eat or take his
medicine, and raising an alarm if he falls over or is inactive too long. He watched a lot of review
videos and participated in an online Q&A with representatives of different brands before
deciding on the system and specific sensors he is interested in. He struggled to calibrate the
system. So his son rushed round five times in the first week to false alerts of falls, and the
system continually nagged him about missed meals and exercises that didnt seem to make
sense. Colin and his son used the national patient portal for advice. Colin decided to share
data with a team working to optimise routinelearning based at a German university, which
is an approved NHS research partner. In return for his data, they offer suggestions on how to
calibrate sensors and make him a beta tester for a smarter learning system.
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2030 LANDSCAPE
By 2030, healthcare benefits from more precise knowledge about how genes affect different
individuals physiology. Detailed data sets on human genetic information (genomics) are
complemented by phenomics: data on phenotypes including human proteins, hormones
and metabolic processes. These are combined with ubiquitous monitoring devices and
sophisticated data analysis technology. Large investments in precision medicine came with
heavy R&D costs. More monitoring technology initially meant more diagnoses. Together these
initially increased the cost of treatment the UK population. But the gamble paid off. Now, it is
possible to quickly and accurately diagnose a condition, and create a treatment plan tailored
to the individual using a new generation of decisionsupport tools. The benefits for precision
care are now felt in cost terms as well as clinical ones.
New knowledge fuelled by new kinds of data

Diverse forms of data and knowledge will be used in clinical medical settings. There is better
understanding of the multiple factors at play in a single persons condition. Depending on the
kind of condition and possible treatment options, a clinician may look for some combination
of the following:
Genetics. Most people have had at least some of their genes sequenced during their
life. Individual genetic profiles are correlated with different reactions to a given drug.
Responsiveness to cancer treatments is related to specific cell mutations. The likelihood of
developing certain conditions has a known genetic basis.
Transcripts and proteins. These biological markers are signals of how genetics are expressed
in a particular person. Complete sets of this phenomics data, would be part of a biologically
precise picture of human health. There is likely to be more conclusive understanding of
epigenetic factors: when the physical environment or lifestyle of previous generations affect a
persons gene expression.
Molecular information on disease. Sequencing and other pathology tests are also applied to
molecules of infections. It will be easy and quick to profile infections or screen for disease.
Imposed environmental variables. Sensors checking things like air quality, light and noise
levels are everywhere. There is more knowledge of how these factors affect human health.
Local air quality or lack of open space are already known to affect health.
Comorbidity and polypharmacy. Profiles of patients will make the interrelated effects of
multiple diseases and drug regimes clearer.
Lifestyle and diet. These factors interact with treatment and can heighten specific risks.
Targeted treatment backed by strong research

Precision diagnosis is supported by specialist centres, providing treatment and support for
individuals with similar groups of conditions or in need of similar care. This reorganisation
aligns the care system with the new kinds of precise medicine and profiling that are now
possible. Selfmonitoring technology updates these profiles and helps direct people to the
correct centre when they need care. An expanded MSc programme for NHS staff in genomic
medicine has created a generation of genomic medicine advisers in local services.
This is backed by a strong data analysis infrastructure. The pathology lab in each NHS
trust manages fewer tests each day; biomarker tests are now used routinely in pharmacies
and clinics, without the need for a lab. Selfmonitoring data is analysed partly by private
12

providers, and partly by a distributed network of governmentowned facilities. Decisions

about whether to change medication or bring a patient into the clinic are then made by local
specialist centres. Clinicians in these centres have access to much richer data in order to make
a decision about a patient.
This is wellintegrated with biomedical and digital health research. Frontline centres are
also research facilities, connected to a network of regional research hubs. Together they
continue to try to understand the complex interactions between biological, behavioural and
environmental factors in an individual. This approach aids faster translation from lab to clinic.
Accurately targeted treatment development and regulatory processes permit a number of
steps to be executed in parallel. Large biomedical research companies have changed their
business model. They work on many more projects at any one time, each of which will be
highly effective in people with a specific profile. Treatment is less focused on pharmaceuticals,
including more devices and behavioural change too.
Largescale data analysis over massive populations with many identified characteristics
requires highperformance computing meaning that there is still one central bioinformatics
research campus. This has become the centre of global efforts to create a common language
for describing human biology and behaviour, i.e. shared genotypephenotype standards.
Bioinformatics is pushing data scientists to produce more complex models than any other
field. New centres in biological computing exist at several UK universities, with funding from
technology multinationals.
Precision care from precision medicine

There are clear advantages to healthcare that connects precise information about a person
and the relevant medical research:
Preemptive or earlier treatment will reduce the burden of care.
There will be new kinds of treatment responding to complex features of disease.
The number of cycles of treatments would be hugely reduced, saving considerable time
and money for each patient journey, improving quality of care at the same time.
For many conditions it will be possible to identify subgroups of patients who all need a
similar approach. For these patients assets and working patterns can be optimised to
meet demand efficiently.
These subgroups will change the treatment development pipeline too, allowing more
targeted trials and deployment of new techniques.
Section 2 links these changes with patients access to the health system.
SIGNALS OF CHANGE
Todays medical knowledge is based on the average response to a particular treatment.
However, drugs and other therapies do not have identical impacts on everyone; there is wide
variation in response, and many people have no response at all. Individual variation in biology
and behaviour has a role in explaining these differences. The way that these factors are
manifested in the human body is complex and still not well understood.
There are programmes gathering and interpreting the data needed to develop precise
medicine. The 100,000 Genome Project is perhaps the most well developed example
sophisticated whole genome sequencing and well developed data collection and
13

management. There are increasingly accessible tests for molecular data about humans or
infectious disease. These might provide the first widelyused precise diagnostics. There will
also be new forms of patient data collection and smarter ways to move data around the
health system.
Genomicallyprecise medicine
The UK is home to a trailblazing project offering whole genome sequencing for 100,000
individuals where more knowledge about their genome could lead to better treatment for
a rare disease or cancer. The pilot for the project has had a few early successes, diagnosing
some conditions that can be treated. Its predecessor, Deciphering Developmental Disorders,
sequenced part of the genome in over 8,000 children, finding 12 new genes that contributed
to rare diseases. Its not clear whether the rationale for whole genome sequencing goes
beyond those with rare diseases and specific cancers. But the infrastructure created by the
100,000 Genome Project is a valuable first step towards a national healthcare system that is
capable of delivering precise, personalised treatment.
There are a number of proofofconcept examples of the gains that come from more
genomically precise medicine. Oncotype DX tests predict a patients benefit from
chemotherapy as well as her risk of breast cancer recurrence. They can reduce chemotherapy
use by 20 to 35 per cent and avoid costs of $4,359 per patient per year. This is a net saving of
$384 annually taking into account the cost of the test. Widespread whole genome sequencing
would likely pick up many more relationships between genes and responses to cancer drugs.
Increased knowledge about the genetic basis of developmental disorders should lead to more
preventative treatments.
The cost of Oncotype DX tests is restricting take up in the UK. Technology improvements are
needed to make these treatments more financially viable. There are promising steps forward.
Whole Genome Sequencing at scale as part of the 100,000 Genome Project costs less per
person than one Oncotype DX test.
Quicker, cheaper biomarkers

Small amounts of data already provide biological markers of disease. A small DNA sample
(rather than a whole genome sequence) is enough to provide useful information when looking
for a wellknown genetic mutation. Cancerous cells produce specific proteins that appear in
the bloodstream, which can be used to predict the patients response to treatment. Particular
proteins can be an early sign of dementia or of potential changes in other physiological
factors like the immune system.
Portable tests for specific genes, transcripts or proteins now exist and will become more
accessible in the future. Oxford Nanopores MinION is currently used with a laptop or PC, but
future devices may run with a smartphone or embedded in household or workplace devices.
The MinION Access Programme offers researchers access to the kit. Early successes for the
MinION include detecting the source of a salmonella outbreak in Birminghams Heartlands
Hospital. Sequencing took 15 minutes, followed by two hours of analysis to identify the strain.
It is also likely to become much easier to take samples from people. There are new non
invasive technologies, like those that use ultrasound combined with microwaves to monitor
molecules in the bloodstream through the skin. These are likely to face lower regulatory
barriers. There are also microneedles that can deliver drugs without the risks that come with
injections.
14

Population level data collection

There are some monitoring technologies that have already made it into the clinic. Cambridge
Cognitions tablet app for assessing cognitive function is used in GP surgeries across the UK.
In the future this kind of tool could be used for a more continuous monitoring of behaviour:
providing new kinds of information for researchers and an early warning system for those
at high risk of dementia. Neurosky produce consumer EEG kits, which measure brain signals
related to concentration levels. They work closely with the research community. Treatment for
stroke victims can be changed in response to realtime information on the brain activity from
patients in the future this might be done using the portable headset.
When patients exhibit early symptoms of Alzheimers or

Parkinsons, even relatives and friends can find it difficult to
recognise them. It might be that tracking patient behaviour
through for example mobile phones could allow detection
of symptoms for early diagnosis and treatment. My worry is
that this would require scanning everyone every day, and is
just a bit too Orwellian.
Professor Neil Lawrence, Professor of Machine Learning and Computational Biology,
University of Sheffield
Machine learning is a group of computing techniques that may be able to discover new
signals of illness or monitor the effects of treatment. It requires huge volumes of data to be
effective. It is already employed to automate the analysis and diagnosis of medical images.
Radiological images are analysed to find features without a doctor there to supervise or direct
it. These techniques applied to information from wearable technology could provide a step
change in the fine grained information we have about human behaviour and health.
Nesta has developed the idea of digital health communities, as a way to describe new kind
of emerging intermediary in this area. Through the Centre for Social Action, Nesta and the
Cabinet Office have funded uMotifs Big PD project. This is a data driven community for
those with Parkinsons Disease (PD). Drugs to control the symptoms of Parkinsons wear off
in hours, vary in their effects unpredictably from person to person, and become less effective
through repeated use. The 20 minutes per year that patients spend with a consultant is rarely
enough to get this medication right. Big PD aims to use accelerometer and other data to
track body movements, and give early warning signs of medication wearing off. Clinicians,
and often patients themselves, will be able to medicate much more accurately. This data will
also be useful for research and early diagnosis. PD is often present for up to ten years before
diagnosis. This is what the ultimate data sharing system, centred on a new digital health
community, might look like.
15

An ideal digital health communitys data sharing system
Patient
Wearables
Clinician
Data Analysis
Wearables
Smart phones
Big PD
Data
Knowledge
Research
Request
Research
Community
Smart consent
There is range of new tools designing consent systems that are more attuned to peoples
concerns about how their medical data is used in research. This includes dynamic consent:
where participants use a web interface to consent to specific research using their data, and
where they can reverse that decision. The 10,000 Personal Genome Project, run through UCL
in the UK, offers an online course, in order to ensure informed consent. All participants have
to take this before having their genome sequenced. The UKs BioBank process for providing
biological samples includes oneonone consultations before participants give consent. This
is an expensive and timeconsuming process. Changes to the European data protection
legislation will affect consent for data used in research. This will be most disruptive if it
requires consent for each research project rather than blanket consent for researchers to use
individuals information in their research.
16

2. A Health Knowledge Commons
2. A HEALTH KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

New knowledge used differently: people managing their own health
information, personalising their care and creating new kinds of health
knowledge
Allies father used the videodiary function on NHS Citizen to log her responses to at home
early years activities like the impact of structured play on cognitive development. It is normal
to be involved in these kind of studies. He met some other parents online, discussing the
limitations of the standard at home tool for those without access to a garden. They are now
working together to develop a new programme of activities that can be done with outdoor
space. Theyve employed an online interaction designer to helped them create the first
prototype, but they have yet to raise any seed funding to take it further. There are tax reliefs
for investments in health companies that make use of data stored and managed by the NHS
so they are hopeful. The UKs unique, single clinical research infrastructure means the video
data can be linked into Allies medical record and used for future clinical consultations. At a
consultation about Allies early signs of asthma, the doctor pulls up the videos as part of their
discussion about whether Allies daytoday life has been affected.
Bhakti and her diabetes counsellor chose a monitoring system that lets a specialist centre
make most daytoday decisions, while leaving Bhakti completely in control. In the past
Bhaktis management of her diabetes faltered under the pressure of her caring and
volunteering commitments. She moved to this new regime after an adherence consultation,
which she was invited to after a few missed appointments. Her counsellor pressed the point
that while it is natural for her to put her daughter first, an effective carer keeps themselves
healthy too. Bhakti decided that for now, the best solution is to delegate as many decisions
as possible. She wears a blood glucose monitor on her wrist that uses ultrasound to test her
blood through her skin every few minutes. The monitor connects with an app on her mobile
phone, which securely sends the data to her diabetes specialist centre. The data analysis
system housed at the centre sometimes recommends small changes to dosage and diet,
which are checked by a consultant before being sent to Bhakti. Significant changes trigger
the system to book an appointment. All the data is available to her should she want it. But for
now she chooses to only see validated notifications that require action. Though her counsellor
advised continual monitoring of weight and exercise, Bhakti opted to have the app compile
and send only weekly summaries, hiding daily figures even from herself. When the data was
available at her wrist at all times, she found shortterm fluctuations demoralising. For now this
system suits her well, and she knows she can engage more actively at any time.
Colin worries a lot about his memory, but perhaps his slipups are just part of adjusting to
living alone. He often discusses these fears with friends at the local memory cafe. He and a few
other members have used a series of memory checking apps. They share concerns about the
apps accuracy. None are fully licensed according to the latest European standards, and results
vary between devices and software. Once a month, Colin visits the local pharmacist for more
indepth tests on cognitive function. He gets a free consultation with a pathology specialist
to discuss these results, alongside those from his daily proteomic tests at home. Colins
official risk reading has remained unchanged at medium for years. He still struggles to trust
this assessment, but is learning to moderate his own worries about ageing with professional
advice. After a year of selfmonitoring, his pharmacist supports an application by Colin and his
friends at the cafe for funding for a research study using the apps and proteomic data. It is a
huge relief to be able to do something productive about his worries.
17

2030 LANDSCAPE
By 2030, sensor technology will be everywhere. Monitoring changes in biological health and
behaviour is easy and cheap. Most people use devices that pick up these signals to monitor
their own health. The NHS and employers have responded to incorporate these trends into
how they provide for health and wellbeing. This data can be easily integrated with existing
clinical data.
Smartphones and wearables came first. But soon technology companies were producing
portable versions of more complex monitoring systems: air quality monitors, EEG brain
sensors and molecular testing kit to find out whether an infection is bacterial or viral. This
pervasive data collection allows people to perform new kind of constant, mobile health checks
on themselves. Its akin to the dashboard, gauges and alarm signals in a car today, making it
easier for patients and their doctors to track what is happening with their bodies.
Most acute care centre appointments are made automatically. When patients arrive at a clinic
all of the detailed data about them will have been analysed ready to help diagnose them.
These early warning systems have reduced the cost of acute care, particularly for conditions
that can be managed through preventative measures. Pharmacists and local health services
help people interpret the data they have collected about themselves, referring them to
specialists when appropriate. This is vital at a time when most healthcare spending is on
managing longterm conditions, which require close monitoring that can now be done outside
the formal health service.
There was public concern when portable monitoring technologies first became available.
After this period, enforcement of privacy laws increased and a fast growing section of
the population demanded easy routes to sharing their data with each other, doctors and
researchers. People accept that the advantages of data shared under these conditions greatly
outweighs the potential risks.
For some, monitoring technology is part of everyday decisionmaking. They manage their
own care, experiment on themselves, monitor the effect of lifestyle changes and take part in
massive online patient data collection exercises to inform medical research and national policy
decisions. Something like an expanded version of the NHS Citizen platform provides online
discussion platforms. The National Institute for Health Research has programmes to support
patientled research, including managing peer review and developing it into national learning
resources.
Others are less interested, but are happy to sign up for whole genome sequencing and regular
physical checkups. Some are more wary of how data about them could be used by doctors
and researchers. They maximise their privacy settings on the national digital patient portal.
People in the UK in 2030 will use a digital patient portal for other interactions with the health
service too: appointment bookings and contacting specialists and viewing test results. There
will be a hugely expanded digital NHS Choices, including 111Online options for immediate
advice from doctors. This and other platforms provide routes into research: experiments in
service delivery, advice on how to work with medical technology researchers or take part in
largescale clinical trials.
Public Health England has partnered with media organisations and behavioural insights
experts inside the NHS (see Section 4) to provide schemes for people to better manage their
own health, which reach 97 per cent of the population.
18

This system is different from the current frontier of digital health online appointment
booking systems and medical records. It is like peertopeer finance compared to an online
bank account or eBay rather than a simple online shop. The health knowledge commons
offers everyone the chance to integrate their own information and preferences with the health
service they receive. They monitor themselves, choose the services they use and support
those groups and individuals that want to create new kinds of healthcare.
SIGNALS OF CHANGE
There are initiatives today that illuminate the plausible direction of change.
Wearables
There is a new generation of consumer technologies that we wear all the time from
heartbeat monitors to materials that can sense haptic skin response. These are now stretching
out into small sensor technology, including pills with ingestible sensors in them.
Wearables can empower people, helping them bring much

more information to consultations In 2030, there should
be a way for GPs to access this data (as long as they have
the patients permission) and surgeries to be able to do
something about it.
Fran Bennett, CEO, Mastodon C
Early adopters of these kinds of technologies are often also innovators themselves, and often
want to customise a product.
The quantified self and biohacking movements are fiercely independent groups starting to
use these technologies, as well as more interventionist approaches, to monitor themselves
and improve their health. The Grindhouse wetware group in the US is one of the most fringe
efforts. They have developed their own medical tracking arm implant. The Circadia records
body temperature, heart rate, and time. The threeinch long device sits under the skin and
automatically transmits information via Bluetooth. It can be programmed to display health
warningsusing a smartphone to do the analysison the users skin with LED lights.
A 2014 Nesta report provides a snapshot of the new wave of medical technologies starting to
hit the mainstream. The summary of these technologies and associated services was built up
into a vision of portable digital health in the future:
19

MEDICAL
SERVICES
New intermediaries
National health statistics
PatientsLikeMe
give to research
Medical
treatment
centre
Longterm
care support
HealthBank
strictly private
da
ta
al
gn
si
PERSONAL
.BIO DOMAIN
Digital social
activity
DataCoup
sell to companies
Genetic
data
API feed from wearable technology

blood
sugar
Google
glucose-measuring
contact lens
Samsung smart
watch measuring
physical activity
Cambridge
Cognition
app testing
cognitive
function
Sensoria smart
socks analysing
foot movement
mental
concentration
gait
activity
level
Neurosky
Mindwave
EEG
Proteus
ingestible
sensor in
medication
and wireless
monitor
Sensum
haptic
skin sensor
measuring
alertness
20

Maturing systems for managing electronic health records

In Denmark, every citizen has had access to a health portal since 2003. They can choose their
services, participate in their own treatment choices and take part in chat rooms where patients
and their relatives can meet others and consult health professionals. The portal provides the
150,000 Danish health professionals with information to make evidencebased decisions.
At first 30 to 40 year olds used the service most. It is now used equally by 6070 year olds.
Although the two groups vary in the kinds of services they use. In comparison, after almost a
decade and several hundred million euros, the Dutch parliament stopped the rollout of digital
health records in 2011 because of privacy concerns. A new system has now been approved. It
has more transparency builtin; it will show patients which clinicians and researchers access
their records and when. The different passage of digital health records in countries, so close in
culture and politics, illustrates the sensitivity needed in designing these services.
A reinvigorated digital public space

There is a continued public appetite for trustworthy health information. The NHS Choices
website has had over one billion visitors so far. NHS Citizen is being developed as a digital
platform for supporting wider public engagement with health issues and health services.
The idea of a digital public space is being discussed in the context of the BBCs case for
renewing its Charter. This centres on designing new ways to access ever growing library of
digitised media, including educational materials.
So what would the Digital Public Space look like? It should

have all the original values of the Analogue Public Space,
plus some amazing new features and services that were
previously impossible or unimaginable To get there,
perhaps we may need help from the source that created the
BBC in the first place an ambitious desire for there to be
an infrastructure constantly developed in the public interest.
Tony Ageh, BBC Controller of Archive Development, OpenDemocracy.net
Patient communities
Patient organisations are increasingly spaces of innovation. The novelty of their approach
lies in the use of their experiential and clinical knowledge to make themselves part of the
networks of experts on their condition. These groups do not want to be relegated to the role
of fund raisers and passive providers of data but are increasingly engaged in the process of
producing and circulating knowledge that is critical to their condition. The AKU Society in the
UK recently used crowdfunding to finance a clinical trial into the rare disease their members
suffer from. They also have an active online forum and clinical partners.
Consumer data protection

Debates about personal data protection for consumer continue. A Spanish man recently won
a case against Google, forcing the company to remove some sites from searches for his name
creating a right to be forgotten. New initiatives like a yearlong Citizens Advices project
are pushing against a culture of ticking, clicking and hoping for the best. There have been
promising privacyprotecting technologies in recent years, from personal data stores to apps
that alert users to the details of the terms and conditions they sign up to. New European data
protection legislation may improve oversight on how companies use consumer data. But this
will depend on the final legislative decision and how it is implemented nationally. The link
between consumer and health data is likely to get closer, as will the kinds of issues that come
to the surface.
21

3. Health by and with the people
3. HEALTH BY AND WITH THE PEOPLE

More people managing health: people looking after themselves and
each other, supported by the NHS.
At her first meeting with Allies parents, the midwife noted that they struggled to engage
with aspects of shared decisionmaking. The session was at risk of becoming a onesided
explanation rather than a true discussion. So the midwife asks if theyd like to be provided
with a link worker: someone trained in motivational interviewing, communication and health
advocacy. He finds that Allies parents are enthusiastic and opinionated about their daughters
care but unused to engaging in open discussion with health professionals. Hearing that Allies
dads plans to be a stayathome father, and that they have no family and few friends nearby,
the link worker suggests trying out a number of local parent groups, including a what works
club which teaches data capture and coding skills alongside parental coaching. Allies father
is reluctant at first but joins because it also gives him a valuable qualification in embedded
solutions. He stays because he appreciates the newjoiner crches advanced educational toys
and the friendships that develop with local parents.
When a series of group sessions that measure breathing after exercise show Allie has the
first indicators of asthma, her father is concerned, but glad they can act soon to slow its
progression. His motivation to support the what works club soars and he starts to volunteer
at the crche, which Allie loves too. He appreciates that he can use his developing skills to
support others while spending time with his daughter. Allies fathers detailed feedback on
health services they receive earn him an enhanced Peer Support Premium, which is paid
by the local services commissioner to the club. It becomes clear that local air pollution has
contributed to not just Allies asthma, but to many other local children too. The club decide
to use the peersupport money to fund an analysis of the data from their NHSsupplied air
pollution sensors. They use this to launch a successful campaign to lobby the Council to put
traffic calming measures into local roads.
Bhakti is a qualified expert carer, paid to run three therapeutics sessions a week helping
parents of underfives with severe physical disabilities. She received similar peer support
when her daughter was young, but as the sessions were run by a small charity they waxed
and waned according to the unpaid, unregistered teachers caring commitments. Bhakti
was a member of the national support group for her daughters genetic disorder and a local
group supporting people with severe physical disabilities. Both groups were part of a national
campaign by patientled groups for recognition of expert carers skills and value. She was in
one of the workshops in which NHS and patient representatives debated how expert patient
qualifications would be taught and assessed, and their work remunerated. She brought in data
from a survey of over 1,000 families experiences of missing training, and a comparison of the
cost to the NHS of trained versus untrained carers. This became part of the business case that
led to a formalised expert patient training programme.
Colin has osteoarthritis in his knees. He struggles to do the gardening he used to enjoy, but
knows exercise is important, despite the pain. He joins a group that matches people who
have completed courses of gardening therapy for depression with people who can no longer
manage their gardens alone. The volunteer gardeners arrival twice a week motivates Colin
to push himself. Over the summer they become good friends and in autumn they share the
22

rewards of their vegetable plot, laying out a healthy feast as part of a street party. Colin invites
another volunteer who assisted his wife whenever she was discharged from hospital after her
surgeries; she is impressed and relieved to see how active he has been since the bereavement.
Colin used to resent trips to the primary care clinic each visit marked an occasion when his
pain medication failed. But he recently started helping other older people use the personal
health portal in the clinics preparation area. His enthusiasm for wearables and data resonates
with the other older clients more than younger volunteers have in the past. He has more
patience with their mobility challenges. From his wifes last years, he empathises with many
peoples difficulties managing their own health and medication while mainly focused on a
partners care. One person he helped then convinced him to join her at an exercise session
designed for people with arthritic joints. The specialist sessions have really helped his pain.
2030 LANDSCAPE
In 2030, most people feel in control of their health and know there is support to help keep
them healthy whether thats managing a specific health condition or just doing more
exercise. When clinicians diagnose someone with a major health condition, they also connect
them to other people with the same condition to get emotional and practical support at a
critical time.
It is routine for health coaches and service navigators to work alongside clinicians and
patients to enable people to choose and control the social and medical support they need
to live as well as possible. Nonclinical professionals are now integrated within health service
teams to create a bridge of support between the clinical world and life at home.
More widely, local communities donate their time and skills to health services. Volunteers
are often motivated by their own positive care experiences and good will towards the
NHS. Others have ambitions to work in health themselves. Volunteers are trained and given
structured roles that complement paid healthcare professionals. Exhealth professionals are
on call to volunteer in overstretched health services at times of high pressure, such as in
winter months.
Beyond formal health services, there are many more ways to support other people. Dayto
day acts of kindness build vibrant and strong neighbourhoods and they also directly improve
health and wellbeing for the giver and the receiver. Older and previously isolated neighbours
are better supported and more able to live independently for longer.
The NHS has become a network that routinely works with volunteers, carers, voluntary sector
organisations and social enterprises alongside traditional NHS roles. Healthcare is understood
to happen as much in local community groups and between neighbours on the same street, as
in hospitals.
The shift has radically changed the relationship between professional, patient, and society:
Helping ourselves. People are supported to look after themselves better and be in control
of their health. Clinicians work with patients to develop individual health goals and connect
them to services that give people the skills, knowledge and confidence to live better with
health conditions. Those who are less active in their own health receive dedicated support,
such as from a peer coach or social sector broker.
23

Helping one another. People actively support others in peersupport networks to

deliver social, emotional and practical help. Some networks are related to specific health
conditions such as diabetes or stroke. Other networks enable people to be active citizens
by connecting, for example, with older, isolated neighbours.
Helping healthcare. There are clear routes for people to contribute at scale to local
health and care services, including volunteering that achieves clear outcomes and
ways for communities to codesign services with health professionals. There are formal
opportunities for volunteers to help across the NHS, creating a stronger link between
citizens, communities and the health service.
New kinds of consultation
Section 2 points towards the range of channels people would have to communicate with the
NHS in 2030, such as digital patient portals or health monitoring systems that feed data into
the NHS. But it is the interaction with professionals in the NHS that represents one of the
most fundamental changes. More collaborative conversations between people and healthcare
professionals shift power towards the patient, creating more peoplepowered and person
centred care.
Consultations are now structured to encourage and support patients to be active participants
in their own health. The waiting room has been remodelled as a preparation area, where
individuals can log into their personal health portal, which displays their most recent test
results with explanations, asks them to upload their recent wearables data to be considered
in the consultation and has guides on how to set an agenda for a consultation. When the
consultation starts, the patient and doctor agree a joint agenda focused on goals that are
important to the person. The care planning process then establishes the combination of
clinical and social interventions that will help them achieve these. Afterwards there is the
opportunity to debrief with a health service volunteer, reflect on the consultation and arrange
any additional support such as a health coach or care navigator. Local and online peer
support communities are suggested using the expanded NHS Citizen platform, along with
other resources from medical research charities and patient organisations. With thanks to
Adrian Sieff at the Health Foundation for his input in developing this scenario.
Mobilised communities add strength and depth
Health volunteers tangibly improve the experience and care provided in hospital, clinics
and other formal health settings. They are involved in every stage of a patient journey. In
hospital and clinical settings, volunteers perform new roles that are now seen as essential.
They provide a combination of pastoral and practical care for patients and help people to use
digital technologies. They accompany them before and after operations, help people to use
new assistive health devices and organise selfmanagement plans.
Outside of formal health services, volunteers and nonclinical paid staff support people
to take control of improving their health, such as losing weight or doing more exercise,
or to make new friends in their own neighbourhood. Expert patients and carers play a
semiprofessional role as coaches, therapists and leaders of groups with similar medical
experiences or care needs, alongside voluntary or social enterprise sector professionals or
clinicians. This adds a new dimension to healthcare by creating networks of volunteers and
nonclinical professionals that support people to take control of their health, maintain healthy
behaviours and stay on top of their health conditions on a daytoday basis.
Many neighbourhoods now have networks of first aid responders who can attend to some
emergencies before ambulances, and can deal with some situations which do not require
hospitalisation. It is normal to participate in schemes like Shared Lives Plus, providing family
based care and support for people who would otherwise be in specialist health and care
settings. There are tailored volunteer packages to enable people to settle well at home after
an extended stay in hospital, where transition is foreseen as potentially difficult.
24

This level of volunteer and nonclinical support requires interventions that are backed by
robust business cases and ways to attribute positive outcomes to specific changes. Health
service procurement leaders have redefined their role in response. They now actively support
local partnerships of charities, social enterprises and userled organisations. They aim to
actively develop the market of volunteer and nonclinical support to respond to local needs.
Funding is designed to follow local activity and funding entitlements are used to make
financing this support easier. Commissioning uses many different legal and reward structures,
such as alliance contracts that bring together multiple providers who share risk and reward
and work towards a single set of shared outcomes. Contracts are increasingly based on
producing specific, agreed outcomes.
Reducing demand for services
People helping themselves, one another and health services represents a set of new social
movements for health: changing the basics of how the health system approaches the
prevention and management of health, in particular longterm conditions. The impact for the
NHS is improved care, better outcomes and lower costs:
Practical care and support that prevents exacerbations and hospital admissions and
accelerates discharge.
Reduced isolation and loneliness, strongly linked with ill health and high healthcare usage.
Fewer, but more effective, clinical visits and consultations.
Improved patient experience and care while in hospital and other health settings.
People have improved confidence, mood and wellbeing which positively reinforces overall
health.
There is a golden thread of patient confidence, capability and motivation that makes many
of these changes work. So with People Powered Health must come with a more granular
understanding of what motivates people to become active in their health. Section 4 describes
services that make the most of human behaviour amplifying the effects of more people
involved in health services and more people managing their own health.
SIGNALS OF CHANGE
We have not fully harnessed the renewable energy

represented by patients and communities
NHS England, Five Year Forward View
A people powered NHS is a health and care system that is for people, by people and with
people. Nestas PeoplePowered Health programme (201113) supported six schemes that
bring power to the patient and the community, supported by clinicians. The programme
involved five types of practice:
More than medicine. Nonclinical support that gives people the skills, knowledge and
confidence to improve their health and wellbeing, such as health coaching.
People helping people. Peer support that gives people emotional and practical support to live
well with longterm conditions; this can be online or offline, in groups or onetoone.
Redefining consultations. Clinical consultations that are genuine partnerships between
professionals and people, focusing on peoples goals and prescribing both clinical and more
than medicine support to enable them to achieve these goals.
25

Networks and partnerships. Statutory and social sectors harness their combined knowledge
and expertise to commission, design and deliver holistic and integrated healthcare services
focused on what people need to improve their health.
User codesign and codelivery. A health system driven by the people within it, not by the
institutions that provide care, requires deep engagement by people using services in all
stages, from design and delivery to evaluating the service.
These and other forms of personcentred care have demonstrated benefits for a health
system. The Business Case for People Powered Health estimated a 7 per cent reduction
in the commissioning budget if these approaches were put into practice at scale, through
decreasing A&E attendances, reducing hospital admissions, reduced length of stay and
decreased patient attendances. The Realising the Value programme, recently commissioned
by NHS England, will outline the health value, financial value and wider social value in care
that gives people and the community more control.
New models of people helping people

There are already good examples of highimpact volunteering models in a health and care
context. The Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund supports, for example, a British Red
Cross scheme in which older people are supported at a time of crisis, such as bereavement,
by a highlytrained Red Cross volunteer. The Fund also supports national patient charities to
develop their peersupport networks, including networks focused on sight loss, stroke and
lung disease.
Also run by Cabinet Office and Nesta, the Helping in Hospitals programme works with
hospitals to use simple techniques to increase the impact of their volunteers. These include:
Asking nurses what jobs they wish they had time to do that volunteers could help with,
such as holding a patients hand to reassure them before surgery.
Training volunteers in specialist skills like reminiscence games for patients on dementia
wards.
Developing hospitaltohome services to support patients to settle in successfully at home.
The Cabinet Office and the National Tripartite group (NHS England, Monitor, the NHS Trust
Development Authority and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services) also run the
Reducing Winter Pressures Fund using social action to help older people stay well, manage
their conditions or recover from illness or injury, reducing pressure on hospitals.
Coalitions for change

This personcentred agenda is recognised at the national level, including the recent NHS
Five Year Forward View and national coalitions have been formed to make progress at a
local and national systems level including Think Local Act Personal and The Coalition
for Collaborative Care. The partners come from across health and social care, charities,
professional associations and community and voluntary organisations.
Investment in preventative work

Key to scaling these practices will be financial models that enable upfront investment to fund
preventative work. There are a handful of Social Impact Bonds (SIB) in this field already. Ways to
Wellness in Newcastle focused on social prescribing, in other words, nonclinical interventions
to achieve sustained lifestyle change and better selfcare among people with longterm health
conditions. Ways to Wellness were in Nestas PeoplePowered Health programme. The SIB was
launched in 2015 and will run for an initial seven years. Partners include Bridges Ventures, Big
Lottery Fund and the Cabinet Office and have attracted investment of over 1.5 million on an
outcomes payment basis linked to improvement in health outcomes.
26

4. Taking Human Behaviour Seriously
4. TAKING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

SERIOUSLY
More people managing health: insights into human behaviours help
redesign health services, products and treatments to reflects how
people live their lives.
Allies mother has always struggled to maintain a healthy weight. During prenatal sessions with
their midwife and link worker, she said she would like to eat more healthily and lose weight
because she was concerned that being overweight might have a negative effect on her baby.
The midwife helped Allies mother to develop her own plan to live more healthily. The link
worker mentioned a local healthy cooking course. Allies mother went along and found she
enjoyed it. She met lots of other parents. Some, like her, wanted to eat more healthily. Others
go because while they already eat healthily they want to meet new people. Those who have
attended the group for years, now lead the cooking course. She is inspired when the course
leader explains that she herself joined to lose weight due to worries about her first pregnancy.
The midwife also invited Allies mother to try a commitment device that linked the amount of
exercise she does with rewards. She chose to connect it to a set of her favourite games, and
set herself limits on the amount of time she could play them in relation to exercise completed.
As often happens, when given the freedom she was stricter on herself than the devices
default.
Bhakti gets a lot of personal satisfaction from running expert carer sessions for other parents
of children with severe physical disabilities. But after the exhausting, emotional work of
delivering the training, all the required administration and evidence gathering can feel like a
chore. The prompts and submission processes for admin and feedback collection are carefully
designed to be as engaging, effortless and immediately actionable as possible. The analysis
of previous data is prominently displayed, so she can see the reasoning behind the data
collection: the impact of improvements to sessions, both in her own group and scaledup to
the countrywide programme.
Bhaktis daughter has played a massive multiplayer online game for seven years using a system
adapted to her physical disabilities. The game now has features which enable her to take part
in experiments, some of which earn her vouchers and rewards offline. These help researchers
to test hypotheses about the impact of campaign messages, or the structuring of costs and
incentives which could one day inform public health campaigns. This is helpful for researchers
as it can be quick and cheap to experiment, but usually a secondary phase of research is
required to test the ideas in reallife scenarios before it is formally adopted.
Colin uses the health service to help with a number of problems and worries: for his
osteoarthritis and his worries about cognitive decline and to support him living alone after
losing his wife. When Colin comes into contact with services, his personal information and care
history now prepopulates their IT systems by default. In the past, Colin was wary of sharing
this information and had removed consent for information to be shared between services. But
this meant he repeated his story every time he met a new care provider. It also meant that
they were reliant on the information he provided; sometimes he made mistakes or left out
important details that he didnt think were relevant. He decided to try a new joinedup system.
27

Since then, providers have found it easier to respond to Colins individual needs, given his
complex conditions. It is rare that they do not have all the information that they need to treat
Colin. There are few datasharing glitches because the system has been designed over several
iterations with local providers.
Colin always has appointments scheduled after lunch. Recent research carried out in three
NHS Trusts found that people like him were best able to take on board new information in this
time slot. They based this profile on the medicines he takes and his health conditions. Colin
completes a short feedback questionnaire after appointments to allow the NHS to monitor
whether these findings are consistent with his individual case.
2030 LANDSCAPE
The NHS in 2030 has benefited from a commitment to understanding the factors that
influence human decisionmaking and behaviour. At the beginning of the 21st century,
the biggest users of behavioural science were private sector businesses like supermarkets
and internet businesses, who used insights from psychology, data collection and rapid
experimentation to understand their customers and make more money. But in 2030, the
NHS is now considered to be a global leader in its use of behavioural insights. It uses them
to reduce clinical errors, to target programmes better, to make treatments more effective, to
improve patient engagement and to promote the healthy activities which prevent illhealth.
Eliminating human errors that lead to poor health
In 2030, far fewer things go wrong in hospital and in doctors surgeries. This is not primarily
because people are smarter, but because the system is better designed to reduce the
likelihood of mistakes. The process of diagnosis and prescription will be enhanced by access
to greater data resources and analysis than an individual doctor can keep hold of. But this
means they will need sophisticated decision-support tools to help them make the most of
these digital resources.
Clinicians make decisions based on prompts and supports which anticipate natural human
biases or the presence of fatigue and stress. Medical information from the results of blood
tests to scans to monitoring completed in the home is more saliently presented, based on
rigorous testing of design templates, language, colours and visuals. Technology functions as a
reliable failsafe, making the use of faulty heuristics unnecessary and freeing clinicians to focus
holistically on the individual case in front of them.
The equipment, medical settings and technology of 2030 make it easier for the right
decisions to be made. These refinements include new simplified decisionmaking guides
which use a short selection of Yes/No questions to support primary care decisions. These
filter essential information, anticipate a decisionmakers likely biases and provide them with
risk and prevalence information that is simple and easy to digest. Information about cost and
peernorms are also routinely presented when ordering tests and prescriptions to encourage
the appropriate use of resources.
Wearable technologies alert doctors to their risk of decision fatigue in the same way that a
sports coach today can be alerted to a sportsmans risk of physical fatigue in real time during
games. New technology enables doctors to be prompted when there are factors which might
be adversely affecting their decisionmaking, such as the time elapsed since they last had a
break, the number of decisions they have made that day, or number of patients consulted.
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Healthy behaviour is more common

In 2030, people find it easier to make healthier behaviours habitual.
Early attempts to influence peoples habits by providing evidence of the consequences were
mixed. The key to success was not just providing more facts but understanding through a
process of behavioural psychology and experimentation how to present propositions so they
have maximum effect.
All aspects of the way the NHS interacts with its users, from public health campaigns to the
way appointments are administered, have been designed to go with the grain of how people
live their lives. This makes it easier for people to adhere to treatment regimes when they are
ill or at increased risk of ill health. The vast majority of appointments are kept because patient
communications are targeted and there are carefully designed and timed reminders. Peoples
goodwill for the NHS, which has always been high, is maintained and underpinned by finding
new ways for people to get involved, and by fostering feelings of reciprocity.
The NHS does things that make lives easier, such as appointments that fit around their
schedules, remote consultations and waitfree access to services, even at short notice. This is
achieved through accurate prediction of demand for health services, based on close analysis
of peoples healthseeking behaviour. Accurate anticipation of these demands feeds into the
design of services and staff rotas, making the NHS proactive, rather than reactive. People
repay the favour by helping with trials, providing feedback, being more responsive to change,
and sticking to plans they jointly agree with their doctor.
There has also been progress in working with food retailers, architects and town planners
to use design to prompt healthier choices, or to direct peoples automatic reactions to the
environment towards healthier options. For instance, the design of the public realm now
makes it easier to walk or cycle than to drive in most city centres. The Department of Health
has made some progress in partnering with supermarkets, fast food restaurants, alcohol and
tobacco companies to develop and adopt business cases which engage consumers differently,
prompting them to make healthier consumption choices. The companies found this preferable
to stricter regulations and higher duties, and analysis suggests that it has had some positive
impact on reducing the consumption of vice goods.
Designing, testing and improving frontline services

There are Experimental Service Change Units within regional NHS directorates. They can help
the frontline to design, coordinate and evaluate experiments, in partnership with external
organisations and research institutions. The units can help spot opportunities for rapid
experimentation. They then facilitate a partnership with research institutions to design and
implement trials. Behavioural insight trials are added to a live database of all randomised
control trials (RCT), to avoid replication. Knowledge of this database is higher among health
professionals and there are high levels of enthusiasm to participate.
There is a similar platform for patients, patient groups and healthcare providers. For patient
associations and peersupport groups, participation is incentivised through the provision of
feedback which helps them to improve the support they provide and makes their role more
rewarding. Some of these experiments happen in a simulated environment online, including
integration with some mass multiplayer online gaming worlds. These tools are often cheaper,
or avoid difficult ethical issues with realworld experimentation, but application is still limited
and realworld testing is still required should online results be positive.
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The use of behavioural insights is governed by consent from the public. Public discussion
forums for behavioural insights have been set up online using the new digital platforms
mentioned in Section 3 to agree the terms on which government and health authorities
can responsibly pursue behavioural change initiatives. This provides the public complete
transparency about plans to test and use behavioural insights, and the ability to raise
concerns about these plans. A deliberative discussion is used to explore these concerns, and
in some instances the public can stop the testing of behavioural insights.
SIGNALS OF CHANGE
Behavioural science has been used successfully by private sector companies for decades, and
is now an increasingly common tool in public policymaking. For governments it is the aim for
policymaking to be informed by the likely impact that policy decisions will have on human
choices and behaviours. It seeks to understand the wide variety of influences on behaviour
and decisionmaking and patterns of healthpromoting or harming behaviours. It then aims
to use this knowledge to inform the design of environments, products and systems that make
it easier for us to make healthier choices.
There is huge potential for the health sector. Many people eat unhealthily, drink too much
alcohol, smoke cigarettes and dont exercise enough behaviours that are set to exert
increasing pressure on the health system. Through behavioural insights we are beginning
to understand how this can be tackled. Our decisionmaking is heavily influenced by
various mental shortcuts, such as being loss averse or focussing only on experiences of the
present moment, whilst failing to take longterm costs and benefits into account. Often
these shortcuts are helpful enabling efficient decisionmaking in the face of multiple
considerations but at other times they can lead to choices which are harmful to our health.
Behavioural insights can inform various actions to make healthy behaviours more likely
by changing the architecture of choice, through the careful design of incentives and
disincentives, reinforcing positive social norms or reducing the friction we experience
in forming healthy habits. Research has already found some powerful insights about the
influences on decisions and behaviour in a health context:
Commitment Devices. Signing a symbolic contract has been shown to increase success in
performing a regular physical activity.
Decision Fatigue. The cumulative effect of making repeated care decisions increases the
likelihood that primary care clinicians prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for acute respiratory
infections. This offers an opportunity to create an intervention which makes antibiotic
prescription when tired impossible.
The Cabinet Office report Applying Behavioural Insights to Health provides more examples:
Defaults. Including a prompted choice of organ donation on application forms for driving
licenses increased the percentage of people signed up to donate organs from 38 per cent to
60 per cent in Illinois.
Visual Prompts. A supermarket chain in New Mexico, USA increased the amount of fruit and
vegetables its customers purchased (without affecting profits) by creating a visual prompt in
its trolleys which marked out one section for fruit and vegetables.
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Incentives. The Step2Get Initiative which combined an interactive game, swipe card
technology and a reward scheme increased the number of children who walked to school by
18 per cent.
Reciprocity. Schemes which offer reciprocity for time spent volunteering to deliver social care
have been found to be successful in different contexts. Japan was one of the first countries to
test this model and now has over 400 local schemes. A pilot of the scheme in a London local
authority found it increased volunteering and delivered a positive costbenefit ratio.
At present, the use of behavioural insights is considered a relatively niche and discretionary
activity. Public Health England and the Department of Health have dedicated behavioural
insights teams, but outside of these central bodies behavioural insights are relatively
underused. Yet encouraging healthy behaviour is one of the most cost effective things a
Government can do. Moreover, there are behavioural aspects to almost everything the NHS
does, from the daily work of professionals through to the organisational decisions taken in
commissioning groups, arms length bodies, regulators and in the Department of Health.
This approach is not a replacement for other governmental levers, such as legislation,
regulation and taxation. Instead, behavioural insights complement these levers. They can be
used to make other approaches more effective, or to evaluate them for effectiveness and
unintended consequences.
Behavioural insights are a good fit for supporting innovation in the health service. They can be
cheap to implement, manageable for existing staff to adopt, measureable using existing data
sets, scalable and provide immediate pragmatic improvements to services.
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The shape of the NHS in 2030
THE SHAPE OF THE NHS IN 2030
It is not just NHS users but also the staff that might experience a very different health
system by 2030. The institutional layout and ways of working could be fundamentally
different. People are doing much more to look after themselves. They come into the clinic
with more knowledge about their own condition and a stronger idea of what they need
from a health service. This chapter draws on some of the changes in Sections 14, imagining
more fully what this means for the kinds of jobs, information infrastructure and institutional
arrangement of the health service in 2030.
WORKING THE NHS IN 2030

By 2030, the jobs available inside the NHS are radically different. So are the ways of working.
A partnership approach between healthcare professional and patient is now standard and
particularly welldeveloped for those with complex conditions. These partnerships focus on
peoples needs and equipping them to selfmanage. Professionals understand themselves as
expert partner rather than instructor.
At the same time, other paid or voluntary staff have an equally critical role to support
patients to engage in collaborative care so that they have the skills, knowledge and
confidence to do so.
Training for doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals, both pre and post registration,
now has a significant emphasis on the role that they as a professional can play in empowering
their patients. This involves core components run by people with lived experience of long
term health conditions, who coach trainee professionals in a personcentred approach to care.
Healthcare students are trained to a high standard in motivational interviewing techniques
and coaching. Secondments working with independent patient groups are common.
Surgical and clinical productivity is increased through specialist healthcare settings, where
doctors gain greater exposure to complex and difficult cases. These improvements mimic a
factoryline model of production, which has been argued to enhance clinical and surgical
skill. They also make use of the thesis that standardised processes, like checklists, reduce
errors. Such specialist centres employ fewer people than in the equivalent services at the
moment. There creates a greater reliance on a smaller number of highlyskilled people, whose
increased productivity reduces the strain on the system.
Automated diagnostics are used everyday by many people. Clinicians can play a more active
role in research and have more data to use in diagnosis and treatment decisions. These also
reduce the tasks that frontline staff have to do, creating more time for them to engage in
collaborative care. Pharmacies have a significant role in analysing patient monitoring data.
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The shape of the NHS in 2030
Making change happen in 2030

The NHS has become expert at continual rapid experimentation, learning and adaptation. The
frontline is now the main driver of innovation, backed up by local leadership and by technical
and analytical support to ensure change is datadriven. This combination of an empowered
frontline, facilitative leadership and realtime data makes the NHS the largest organisation
in the world that has cracked the code on continuous adaptation and change. This emerged
out of continual experimentation with organisational models for devolving decisionmaking
to local health systems while building an NHSwide culture of experimentation, results
orientation, and peoplecentric care.
In 2030 the focus of NHS analysis teams has shifted from providing regular snapshots of
activity in the system, to analysing what is working in real time. These teams have become
an inhouse technical capacity for experimentation analysis, working across services and
geographies. They offer feedback on changes to services, or experiments with behavioural
insights. They can quickly spot emerging changes in patterns of demand and call for
resources to be reallocated as a result. They use combinations of data to segment patients,
configuring services and interventions that best respond to their needs. Their work is
ingrained in daytoday practice and easily accessible by a wide range of staff.
2030 Institutions
The NHS estate looks different in 2030, with fewer large facilities and more smaller
community settings. The move towards People Powered Health and community based
care has finally reached a scale at which some big hospitals can reduce in size, and district
hospitals have closed altogether, or been reconfigured as community health resources where
a range of clinical and nonclinical groups support communities to live healthier lives. There
are more polyclinics, and health professionals are increasingly colocated with other public
services, creating more accessible health services. This diversity in primary care is supported
by common data infrastructure. This set of standards and protocols for data analysis and
storage is shared with pharmacies, which manage patient monitoring data.
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What challenges lie along the way?
WHAT CHALLENGES LIE ALONG THE WAY?
So far this paper has described an optimistic vision of the opportunities created by 2030
health service where knowledge and people power are starting to have a positive impact.
But there are challenges that could trip up these opportunities along the way.
Challenges in creating a knowledgepowered system

Managing uncertainty in the pace and direction of medical research
There is huge uncertainty in the speed and direction of change in the science and technology
developments that underpin precision medicine. A healthcare system that makes the most
of these is one that flexes to unexpected breakthroughs and setbacks. It will also need
ways to manage much more precise information about the patient, and new care pathways
that respond to this detailed information. This will takes decades, partly because a radical
reorganisation of a large a structure cannot happen quickly and partly because its not yet
clear what kind of new treatments precision medicine research will lead to.
Making certain data management reflects patients values

National systems or platforms for managing sensitive information will time and time again
come up against issues of trust. For some, it must be clear what will happen because they
have sequenced their genome or who else is sharing and commenting on their input into a
forum on diabetes services. When people agree to take part in specific research studies, it is
not the detail of consent forms that matters; it is a subtler judgement of trustworthiness. As
information circulates more freely, it will always need to be designed with this constraint in
mind.
Avoiding monitoring that doesnt improve health

More data on patients can lead to earlier diagnosis and prevention of disease. This is often
assumed to save the health service money. But in some cases, screening costs can exceed the
potential savings from avoided treatment in cases in which only a very small fraction of the
population would have become ill. At a larger scale, monitoring technologies could lead to a
worried well and risk of mistaken selfdiagnosis. Without partnerships between technology
and healthcare providers, this data may not be suitable for use in the clinic. For instance,
when it is not clear who data comes from, only which account was used to produce it, then
that data cannot be used in a diagnosis.
Creating a smart collective intelligence

This scenario, particularly Section 2, assumes that digital platforms will improve collective
problemsolving. Some define the kind of platform that does this is as a hybrid, diversity
aware collective adaptive system. This kind of collective intelligence combines humans,
machines and different kinds of knowledge in a system that is aware of itself enough to
keep learning. The diversity this refers to is in those using the system; it has to be inclusive,
adding another reason addressing health inequalities. It also requires, for example, patientled
research to provide more knowledge creation than confusion. It must be smart enough to
keep learning from new medical research, public campaigns and feedback from service users
as it emerges. Only then is it likely to deliver at scale exchange and production of ideas, which
no individual, group or machine can alone.
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Challenges in creating a peoplepowered system

Building evidence from experiments in the health services
The evidence base is still not mature enough to justify large shifts in the allocation of
commissioning budgets. Practice on the ground indicates significant impact, but more
research is required to establish a rigorous understanding of which interventions work, for
whom, and under which circumstances. It also requires a wider view of what counts as a valid
outcome incorporating biomedical indicators but not being limited to them. This would be
helped by a better evidence base. As a result of lack of robust evidence, many social sector
organisations providing People Powered Health are poorly funded and financially insecure.
The strain on NHS finances also makes it hard to freeup funding to pay for preventative
programmes.
Although People Powered Health and behavioural insights do not have to be evaluated
through Randomised Control Trials (RCTs), there are many advantages to doing so. RCTs
are perceived as being expensive and timeconsuming this does not have to be the case.
The NHS needs access to the technical capacity needed to experiment robustly, rapidly and
inexpensively on itself.
Reducing health inequalities

Some aspects of a more knowledgepowered system could increase health inequalities.
Patient portals in the US are used mainly by white, educated people. UK citizens who have
taken part in medical research are twice as likely to be interested in learning more about
all aspects of medicine development as those without experience. But services focused on
activating people might be able to mitigate some of these changes.
Patient activation measures (PAM) are a way to evaluate an individuals knowledge, skill, and
confidence for selfmanagement. Socioeconomic status is already a determinant of health.
But a high PAM score predicts positive health outcomes better than factors like ethnicity
and age. Implemented well, interventions can increase activation, and potentially reduce
inequalities. This requires a strong understanding of what motivates different people. Support
will need to be structured in ways that resonate with a diversity of people and communities,
including poorer or more marginal groups. There remains a risk that interventions to increase
patient activation favour those with most financial or social resources at their disposal.
Designing attractive volunteering schemes

Volunteering must be easy to integrate into different lifestyles not just for the retired, for
example if volunteering at mass scale is to be achieved. Roles also need to be designed
in ways that complement those of paid professionals and achieve additional value.
Implementation of mass volunteering will have to balance local differences in context and
ownership with the desire to adopt these practices at scale and understand which models of
volunteering are most effective.
Activating doctors as well as patients

There are significant challenges in reorienting professional development from expert
instructor to partner and collaborator. This future scenario challenges those trained in a
biomedical model of health, which comes with a specific understanding of whose knowledge
is valid and on what basis. Some professionals recognise that a combination of social as
well as clinical support is required to enable people to selfmanage and are committed to
creating pathways focused on peoples own goals. They could be described as activated in
an analogous way to patient activation measures (PAM). Others find it is difficult to reconcile
new models with their professional training. In that sense, these professionals have low
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activation scores and are less likely to engage with People Powered Health.
Building public legitimacy for NHS experimentation

It is not clear how to deliver consent from all potential patients for an NHS that is
experimenting with new services. This is a particularly acute problem when those experiments
are built on behavioural insights. The idea of using behavioural insights to nudge behaviour
has been interpreted as government overstepping its remit by attempting to influence
individual behaviour. There need to be bodies that can reflect these concerns in the design of
new experiments.
Balancing experimental services with efficiency

Freeing staff to allow them time for collaborative care with patients, in a way that motivates
and empowers them, means finding more efficient, productionline like approaches to other
aspects of healthcare. But its unclear how much of healthcare can be plausibly delivered
through specialised centres. This will rely on more computerised systems to profile patients
and make recommendations for where they are referred. A series of specialist centres that rely
heavily on automated, unchecked referral systems would run the risk of creating unintelligent
and inflexible healthcare. The health service will need to find a way to become more efficient
and more compassionate at the same time.
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What could be done now?
WHAT COULD BE DONE NOW?
A peoplepowered, knowledgepowered NHS would look profoundly different to the NHS of

2015. This transition will require continual experimentation, feedback and adaptation, as we
learn more about what works and what doesnt. Its not possible to know in advance all the
changes required to realise this vision of an NHS in 2030. But there are broad categories of
changes that will be necessary for the system to shift:
Designing a system with greater public legitimacy and higher levels of individual
engagement.
Building the foundations for services designed to offer diverse roles for more people.
Creating a natural learning system within the NHS.
Establishing a common data infrastructure that can handle new sources and quantities of
data.
Some of these changes are happening anyway. In the Conclusion, there are four proposals
for action (AD) in areas where new initiatives are required. Where these link to ideas in this
section, they are highlighted in the text below.
Supporting the individuals role in the health system
Technological advances require parallel progress in the

communication of value, risk, and uncertainty to the public
in ways that foster trust and enable informed choice and
optimum engagement
Horne et al., A new social contract for medical innovation, letter in The Lancet
Medical research leaders in the UK have called for a new social contract for medical
innovation, where greater attention is paid to the public interpretation of medical knowledge,
and delivers services sensitive to how much individuals want to know about their biological
and genetic status. It is one where patients own goals, preferences and actions are valued.
This will require new kinds of interactions between health service and individuals, designed to
reflect the diverse ways people want to interact with those services.
New relationships between patient and professional
If you havent persuaded practicing clinicians then its hard

to see how this would be taken up. Care is delivered by
clinicians they must be persuaded
Richard Murray, Director of Policy, Kings Fund
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The interactions between professionals and patients heavily influences how everyone thinks
about their own role in healthcare. Shifting the emphasis of these interactions towards
collaborative care planning requires changes in the way doctors and nurses are trained
and supervised. And it is an opportunity to rethink conceptions of selfcare, expanding it
to include activities currently in the domain of professionals with expert knowledge. This
transition has already begun in some areas, such as the Ryhov Hospital in Jnkping, Sweden,
where patients are trained to administer their own kidney dialysis. In England, targets for
numbers of patient care plans have distracted some healthcare professionals from the reason
for care planning it is a tool for doctors and patients to make decisions together.
This approach could be extended by piloting of new approaches to consultations and
selfcare: flipped consultations, where tests and symptom checks are done outside of the
consultation room and appointments are used to actively plan care; group consultations,
in which there is one clinician and several patients with the same longterm condition in an
active learning environment; or expanding Health Checks to Life and Wellbeing Checks to
take account of wider determinants of health including social factors.
One way of supporting patients engagement with doctors is to provide access to their own
data more easily, or move data into services they want to use. This could include a better
system for accessing the GP API, which apps for appointment booking or offering new care
services could be built on.
Clinical decisions today are based on parcels of data, not continuous monitoring. Data from
new monitoring technologies runs the risk of creating a rift between patient and physician
if their perceptions of data legitimacy differ. To mitigate this risk, other intermediaries in the
healthcare system could take on a larger role, offering access to and consultation on the
output of monitoring devices.
Mass public engagement

There is an opportunity to build a platform for a new scale of public engagement with health
issues. This would support public campaigns, health education and debate beyond NHS
Choices and Public Health Englands current remit. The ambition should be to deliver a large
scale change in how people understand and manage their own health; NHS apps and BBC
campaigns like The Girl Can are the first steps in this direction. This could be a way to deliver
part of proposal A.
But mass communication needs to be carefully designed to avoid producing a service that
encourages a large number of worriedwell, and increases the number of unnecessary
treatments or consultations. Mass engagement can easily bias who it reaches by the
communication channel it uses. Largescale audience engagement would be best done in
partnership with media organisations that are used to this kind of communication.
Making sense of new kinds of knowledge

From biohackers to patient organisations, there are independent efforts to produce new
medical knowledge and where people with treating themselves. Supporting what are informal
and dispersed efforts requires tools that work well with these kinds of networks. They also
need initiatives that finds ways to bring experiential knowledge to bear inside the health
service. The Centre for EvidenceBased Medicines governance and transparency work
supports health professionals and patients who want to challenge the status quo in medical
research and practice.
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This campaignbased approach could be extended to a more permanent function that helps
structure health knowledge from outside the current research and clinical system so that it
is useful inside that system. This might include direct support for patient organisations already
trying to do this. This could be a way to deliver part of proposal A.
Services built on public values

There are already legitimate demands from patients to get more back from sharing data and
participating in their own care. These need to be dealt with more directly. In 2014, care.data
an initiative to extract data from NHS primary care medical records in England unless patients
have purposefully opted out proved publicly controversial. This was curious because the
current protocol for access to hospital patient data had existed since 2012. Anonymised
information can be linked together to enable studies using detailed information about
individual patients. Media debates over care.data reiterate the need for a social, rather than
just legal, license to operate for research that uses NHS patient data.
There needs to be more information on why people give their data to research. At the
moment, researchers pay a small fee to access NHS patient data. This covers data storage and
data cleaning costs. But some patients may prefer the NHS to make a profit from sharing their
data, especially if the researchers work for a pharmaceutical or technology company. Others
may want to put restrictions on who accesses their records or are more interested in hearing
about the results of the research.
Improved understanding could be delivered through schemes that prototype for new kinds of
data sharing with the health service and researchers including trialling consent mechanisms.
More generally, there needs to be an independent initiative to quickly develop responsible
governance of datadriven health research and treatment. This could include research that
maps out appropriate constraints on data sharing and models for managing these, overseen
by an expert group that includes legal advisers, social scientists, data scientists and clinical
researchers. This could be a way to deliver proposal B.
One of the most important roles for central government

in the coming years will be to ensure that local and
professional applications of behavioural approaches are
rigorously evaluated, and the results made available for
communities to debate and adopt as they see fit
Institute for Government and Cabinet Office, MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public
policy
Trials based on behavioural insights must be built on shared values for what is ethical and
in the public interest . To do this, there should be transparency about what is happening:
from the design of experimentation through to dissemination of results and diffusion of
new approaches. It needs to be clear to any member of the public looking at the use of
behavioural insights in health that experimentation is not being treated as an end in itself. This
could be addressed by a government advisory committee responsible for overseeing health
service experimentation that has positions for citizen representatives.
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The foundations of new peoplepowered health services

An institution for People Powered Health research
[Person centred care] is often spoken about as if it is soft,

but it isnt. We should apply the same rigour to this as we do
to other health treatments
Adrian Sieff, the Health Foundation
Interventions that increase selfcare and nonclinical support are usually complex and
difficult to replicate faithfully. There needs to be a new highprofile organisation to generate
more evidence, starting from strong foundations: academic credibility, sustained funding,
diverse expertise and a clear mandate. The Coalition Government signalled its commitment
to life sciences research with the cuttingedge Francis Crick Institute. There should be the
same commitment to People Powered Health. It is important that the institute can quickly
demonstrate value and build momentum.
Government should seedfund a partnership of academic, charitable and government
institutions undertaking groundbreaking research and development into patient and
community participation in health and care. The institute should support design of new care
pathways focused on prevention and with a significant role for community engagement. This
could be a way to deliver proposal C.
The Institute would provide a highbenchmark for evidencegathering. Through standard
templates, it could aggregate and analyse programme evaluations. It should invest in models
that translate large quantities of research and evaluation data into information to support
service commissioning or care planning.
Visible proofofconcept for behavioural insights

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) was able to demonstrate its effectiveness through a
simple experiment which used different letters to test which was most likely to increase self
assessment tax return completions. This showed the approach worked and led to a mandate
for wider application.
BIT recently trialled simple interventions in partnership with Public Health England. They
sent, for example, different randomlyassigned text message reminders to see which is most
effective at reducing missed appointments. Published results for these trials are expected
soon an opportunity for the NHS to promote this kind of experiment.
A few more centrallydelivered experiments will help the NHS workforce and the public
understand what behavioural insights can achieve. This proof of concept is needed to provide
momentum for a more dispersed culture of experimentation in the NHS. The Behavioural
Insights Teams and Public Health England could work together on a small number of cheap
and widely applicable interventions. From these, they could start to build a presence across
the UK health system, through a sustained attempts to promote these results, and the
approach that generated them.
Mobilising volunteers
A national brand would add status and recognition to the value created by highimpact
volunteering. But any new organisation would have to avoid a onesizefitsall approach,
responding carefully to what motivates people to volunteer in health often a passion to
40

support local people and services in their local area. A national campaign would create a
lighttouch way to bring together schemes such as Kings College Hospital Volunteers and
the St. John Ambulance and Community First Responders, so that citizens willing to give time
know where to find opportunities.
To mobilise a new generation of volunteers, there also needs to be new kinds of opportunities.
This means more digital technologies like the Good SAM app that links registered first
aiders with people who need emergency help. There also needs to be more highimpact
opportunities for volunteering, such as reserve support for services and emergency response.
The roles must be drawn up to complement those of paid professionals, adding additional,
measurable value that is important to patients and carers.
The conundrum is that this has to be generated by patients

and professionals on the frontline, but we also know that
the let 1,000 flowers bloom approach doesnt tend to lead
to rapid change. There is a place for a strategy which is
dominated by individual patients and professionals taking
the initiative, but which has a supportive and proactive
national framework. We need ways for funding to support
where local activity is happening and to trust that, rather
than grant funding arrangements
Ben Jupp, Director, Social Finance
Smart funding for peer support

The ability to galvanise local activity such as peer support for people with longterm
conditions is crucial for a People Powered NHS to succeed. But for many peersupport
groups, local funding is based on grants that are small, insecure and short term. To more
effectively fund peer support and patient groups, public money must follow local activity. This
would be used to test an alternative approach to existing funding models for the community
and voluntary sector.
One way to manage this is through a dedicated central fund, matched locally, to allocate
funding to local volunteering and peer support where the interventions are backed by solid
evidence. This should pay a small perperson PeerSupport Premium, based on there being
a minimum number of members or volunteers in a group. They would have to gather impact
data in return.
The NHS as a natural laboratory

Every day in the NHS there are opportunities to test the impact that small changes have on
existing systems. A national service provides the opportunity for both natural and deliberate
experiments, which, if fully leveraged, would yield significant insights and robust improvement
mechanisms.
The key to experimentation at scale is an engaged and supportive frontline. The frontline
is the best place to test new approaches and for successful ideas to be embedded in work
cultures and practices. But there needs to be demand for these approaches in order for them
to be taken up.
41

Structured schemes for experiments

The most relevant schemes in this context are those that can address common problems, but
are delivered locally. There are structured programmes that focus on prototyping solutions to
clear, identifiable problems. These encourage improvements that are grounded in the reality
of delivery. While the perfect solution remains lost in committee, a visible improvement
builds momentum for change at scale. The Japanese principle of Kaizen is used to design
frequent trials of incremental changes. The Rapid Results Approach uses 100day sprints to
stimulate innovation and collaboration across organisational boundaries.
There are two common themes in these approaches:
Experiments not prescriptions
An iterative approach, based on disciplined experimentation, is faster and more reliable
than rigid planning when dealing with complex systems.
Empowerment not direction
Only frontline staff have the detailed knowledge required to properly configure
combinations of innovations, and get them to mesh with working practice and patient
needs.
Rapid Results schemes use a measurable goal set by the local teams at the frontline with the
support and permission of their local leadership. The teams might choose, for example, to
work towards a percentage reduction in hospitals admissions for the frail population, in 100
days. Each team has a senior sponsor from local leadership and coaches from Nesta and the
Rapid Results Institute to support them to act their way into a new way of thinking. This
kind of approach loosens up institutional boundaries by creating innovation and collaboration
across a whole local system. It also creates local accountability and ownership of change.
These 100day Rapid Results teams can create the local pull for the ideas, solutions, and
tools that are outlined in this report, and they can become the engine for adapting these,
combining them in new ways, and developing new ones that fit the local context. By design,
these create stressors on the local systems that cause them to adapt and evolve.
Nesta, in partnership with the Rapid Results Institute, is adapting the approach to the
UK health care context, starting in health and care systems in Essex. The initial signs are
very encouraging. Scaling this work beyond Essex can help fastforward the future we are
envisioning in this paper.
Embedded behavioural insights

Behavioural Insight experiments require a certain level of technical capacity: the ability to
design experiments which produce valid and reliable results, to implement them effectively,
and to analyse the results. It would be inefficient to try and create this capacity in every health
setting. Instead, there needs to be a small number of teams which can provide technical
support to the wider NHS.
These teams could disseminate results from finished trials and suggest changes to practice,
improving productivity and outcomes without the need for timeintensive or expensive
change processes. They would engage frontline professionals in the development of new
approaches, improving the chances that they succeed. This could be supported through
proposal C.
42

A data infrastructure fit for purpose

The NHS is able to link to longitudinal records of the primary, secondary and tertiary care
delivered to a diverse population of over 60 million patients. The UK has a strong national
clinical and biological research base, with points of participation for citizens, researchers and
clinicians. In this system there is the space to support cutting edge R&D and develop new
treatments and services with the flexibility to change tack when things arent working. But
the data infrastructure that pulls all this together needs to look radically different.
Data for service innovation
We need to talk about the realities of how complicated and

difficult our IT infrastructures often are within the NHS; the
problem of hospitals with countless clinical information
systems, whose data are hard to access, poorly archived
and poorly integrated, remains ubiquitous. These debates
about the future of innovation in healthcare need to
include the truth of where we are in terms of the maturity of
our datasets and the state of our IT infrastructures.
Kevin Fong
For people working in institutions, ways of working are encoded in information systems.
Implementing a change in workflow typically requires changing information systems. This
means changing the configuration of software. So the easier it is to do this, the better. At
present, frontline staff do not find it easy to make changes. Information flows are baked into
the initial design of systems or are only changed during occasional formal reorganisations.
Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trusts new eHealth system came with
training for more than 100 of the Trusts staff, qualifying them to adapt the software
themselves. This may still be a fairly inflexible process, but it is a move in the right direction.
Often there is little expectation that frontline staff want data beyond average treatments
times and patient responses. Getting access to data beyond these aggregate results is
possible, but time consuming. Analytics teams should be available to NHS staff, helping them
find and use the data most relevant to their work and to any changes they want to make.
These should come with interfaces for staff to access data, which need to be as simple and
intuitive as those on a smartphone.
Integration with medical research
We have a medical strategy, across Europe. But it looks

very different for each country. Healthcare is fundamentally
national and research is fundamentally international. So the
way that research turns into care will be different in each
country.
Ewan Birney, Associate Director, EMBLEuropean Bioinformatics Institute
43

Research institutions often have stronger overseas networks than integration with the health
service. More and more medical research will be based on the individual rather extrapolation
from clinical trials. This means that research needs to be more embedded in the national
system that provides that kind of access to patients.
The 100,000 Genome Project has put in place a strong loop between clinical and research
community that leads from a patient providing a sample through to treatment. It runs through
a new protocol for data collection, diagnosis and treatment.
Stepbystep processes from whole genome data collection to treatment
Consent
and sample
collection
Treatment
DNA
extraction
Validation
Feedback
to clinician
Clinical data
Interpretation
Biorepository
Sequencing
Variant
calling
A whole genome sequence needs to be compared to other peoples in order to call out its
specific variants. This is then combined with details about the patients full physical condition.
Researchers then examine this profile of the patients in order to send an interpretation
back to doctors. It remains the doctors responsibility to decide on a formal diagnosis and
treatment.
44

This kind of protocol should be embedded further inside healthcare. Some efforts already
exist. New NHS Genomic Medicine Centres are recruiting patients, taking samples and
providing consultations for the 100,000 Genome Project. They extend to tests beyond whole
genome sequencing; a series of molecular pathology nodes in the UK will bring biomarker
research closer to clinical practice: working with the research base, pathology and genetic
services and industry.
Industry partnership will support the translation of this research into treatment.
Biopharmaceutical companies in the GENE Consortium each contribute 250,000 and
at least one fulltime employee to the 100,000 Genome Project, in return for access to
genome sequences and relevant clinical data. They have encouraged the formation of Clinical
Interpretation Partnerships involving more than 2,500 clinicians and scientists focusing on
specific diseases or crosscutting themes. As precision medicine progresses, there needs to
be a more diffuse research and analysis centres, including partnerships with industry, that
close the loop between clinical and research settings.
Genomics England, the body set up to deliver the 100,000 project, is the gatekeeper for
the new standards and systems for data sharing. This creates a single point of access for
researchers and standard forms for data, which mean results are useful to the global research
community. The cost of sequencing was reduced tenfold by using a single supplier.
A central authority overseeing precision medicine will be vital for building the research
infrastructure, including standard formats for data and access to patient records. It will also
coordinate access to developments in underpinning technology like new sequencing kit or
data analysis tools. This could be a way to deliver proposal D.
Integration with new kinds of patient data

New services need to be developed where not just our records but our devices are intimately
connected with the healthcare system.
This is at first likely to include data from wearables like heart beat or activity monitors.
R&D partnerships between research funders and large technology companies, analysing
behavioural and physiological data from wearable devices, could be incredibly powerful. The
Government could play an early role in brokering some of these partnerships.
Wearable technology does not necessarily provide clinically useful data. Data need to
demonstrate its provenance where and when it was collected and from whom to be useful
for healthcare. Conformity marking (the CE mark) in Europe means that producers of lowrisk
medical devices can selfcertify that they meet relevant European Commission directives. This
regulatory advantage should continue. But the requirements should be updated to improve
the clinical relevance of devices that fit in this category, including wearable technology.
Building on the British Standards Institute and the Medicines and Healthcare Products
Regulatory Agencys recent efforts to provide sophisticated data standards for health apps,
medical devices manufacturers should show they have made attempts produce data that
users can use in their medical consultations.
Medical devices that test phenomics particularly biomarkers like proteins in the blood
are increasingly portable and almost cheap enough for a consumer market. The UK has
an opportunity to lead this new market. Technology development is already linked into the
health service and research community, see Nanopore example in Section 1. There is new
government funding for small companies that can support a complex biological data analysis.
There also needs to be direct support for companies producing cheaper, portable tests for
physiological signals.
45

What needs to happen too

Even if all of these initiatives were put in place, there are many things that could still make
a knowledgepowered and peoplepowered health system inconvenient and expensive. To
be clear about what these are, here are some of the things that would need to happen, and
others that would need to not happen for this 2030 vision to produce a better health service:
What needs to happen
What needs not to happen
More patient engagement leads to greater

disease prevention and healthier lifestyles.
More patient engagement leads to expensive

and unnecessary screening and monitoring.
Volunteers add additional capacity to paid

staff they take on some of the tasks that
overworked staff were unable to get to,
freeing them up to deliver highervalue work.
Volunteers are providing additional services

in some areas. Expectations of levels of care
have increased everywhere, leaving staff to
manage additional tasks in areas with fewer
volunteers.
Expert patients and carers provide peer

support to patients from all socialeconomic
groups, reducing demand for longterm care
services.
Expert patientled groups are only used by

educated, middle class people, who use the
groups to access more health resources.
Precision medicine reduces the number

of unnecessary, expensive treatments. It
improves prognosis for many conditions,
especially through early diagnosis.
Precision medicine is biased towards the

most engaged patients, leaving atrisk
groups with few new treatments and needing
long term support for persistent symptoms.
New specialist services produce efficiency

gains. The cost of a single treatment is lower,
and success rates are higher.
Specialist services create new silos, leaving

patients without treatments that respond to
all their symptoms.
Locally managed changes to services create

bespoke initiatives, configured around
patients needs.
Diverse programmes for service innovation

mean that general lessons are not learnt.
They fail to overhaul key regulation like
information governance.
Technologies that measure biological and

behavioural signals are cheaply incorporated
into consumer electronics and purchased by
most patients directly.
The NHS provides large numbers of costly

monitoring devices, as data cannot be
incorporated into care unless it is collected
by an approved device.
Most people support and take part in testing

and use of behavioural insights to improve
their health and health services.
Behavioural insights are poorly tested and

are seen as arbitrary changes imposed on
people, undermining goodwill for the NHS.
46

Conclusion
CONCLUSION
The changes to healthcare imagined in this paper would add up to a fundamental shift in
how people understand health and who is responsible for managing it. By 2030, there may
be new kinds of knowledge, new ways of using it and new kinds of people involved in health
support and services.
There will be many other profound changes that affect the health service. But these are the
ones that Nesta can see coming into focus, through our funding programmes, our research
and our partnerships.
The way to these largescale changes is obscured by uncertainties. Not only are the effects
of other shifts in the health system impossible to predict. There are also serious challenges
in designing successful knowledge and peoplepowered systems. The pace and direction
of change in technology and attitudes to health are hard to forecast. Digital platforms that
enable new kinds of collective health intelligence may never emerge. The assumption that
there is an unexploited appetite for health volunteering might just be wrong. Its difficult to
see a single structure of institutes and initiatives that would be futureproofed against this
range of possibilities.
And there is another reason why understanding how to respond to these opportunities is
difficult. They are not the same in nature to historical options for health reform. Reforming
the social contract between and health service will require policy and support mechanisms
that can respond to the changing rules of engagement. This is not about restructuring the
traditional institutions of healthcare. It is about a setting up today the cogs and gears for a set
of new functions that support healthcare in its broadest sense. These could include:
A. Digital platforms and widely agreed

protocols for developing new kinds of
health knowledge and responding to
the latent demand for taking part in
healthcare. These should make clear
the role of new kinds of knowledge
relative to the biomedical model of
human health. This needs to support
deliberation and negotiation over what is
useful for improving health.
B. P
rototypes for health data sharing that
concentrate on understanding emerging
attitudes to digital privacy. These could
focus on specific products and services.
But should be used as a testing ground
for developing publically legitimate
governance of health data.
C. An institution that supports and

evaluates for People Powered Health
research. This starts to build an NHS that
works as a natural laboratory. It should
be easier for frontline staff to experiment
with the way they run their services,
whether this is adopting behavioural
insights or troubleshooting systemic
issues.
D. A central institution to set standards and
mandate processes that will maximise
the clinical and research value of large
genomic and other data sets as they
become available. The institution will
probably be the best place to take
responsibility for data best managed at a
national level.
47

These are not big initiatives compared to the scale of the UKs health enterprise; they are
suggestions for how to lay the groundwork for a strategic shift that harnesses the value of
people and knowledge power.
Nesta will take on some of these challenges. We will work in partnership to make change
happen. As an organisation, we already fund projects, generate research and lead
programmes that focus on the value of knowledge and people in healthcare. In the future, we
will build on this to better understand and champion the systemic changes they lead to. Our
ambition is to become a hub for restless innovation and critical debate. We want to challenge
the institutions and norms of the health service, making sure that those that exist in 2030 are
fit for purpose and not accidents of history.
48
Nesta
1 Plough Place
London EC4A 1DE
[email protected]
@nesta_uk
www.facebook.com/nesta.uk
www.nesta.org.uk
July 2015
Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091.
Registered as a charity in Scotland number SCO42833. Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE.

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The NHS

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

as colleagues at NHS England and the

Richard Barker, The Precision

Chris Drinkwater, Ways to

Jenny Barnett, Cambridge

Fran Bennett, Mastodon C

Ben Jupp, Social Finance

Richard Murray, Kings Fund

Alisha Davies, Nuffield Trust

Nick Loman, University of

Julia Wilson, Wellcome Trust

Icons for each of the sections were

Section 2 icon credit: Knowledge

Section 4 icon credit: Big Idea by

Section 3 icon credit: Community Health

The Shape of the NHS in 2030 section

Section 1 icon credit: Digital Health by

Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and

2. A HEALTH KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

3. HEALTH BY AND WITH THE PEOPLE

4. TAKING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR SERIOUSLY

THE SHAPE OF THE NHS IN 2030

WHAT CHALLENGES LIE ALONG THE WAY?

WHAT COULD BE DONE NOW?

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

Innovation, technology and the future of the NHS

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

We need a system built from todays signature technologies

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

2030 Vision for the UKs health system

Selfmonitoring technology will be ubiquitous, and used by many to monitor

New services have replaced or changed todays institutes of care. Personalised

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

A financially sustainable NHS

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

Structure of the report

New knowledge used differently

More people managing health

A. Digital platforms and widely agreed

C. An institution that supports and

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

New knowledge used differently: medical information about individuals

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

New knowledge fuelled by new kinds of data

Targeted treatment backed by strong research

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

providers, and partly by a distributed network of governmentowned facilities. Decisions

Precision care from precision medicine

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

Quicker, cheaper biomarkers

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

Population level data collection

When patients exhibit early symptoms of Alzheimers or

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

An ideal digital health communitys data sharing system

THE NHS IN 2030 A VISION OF A PEOPLE-POWERED, KNOWLEDGE-POWERED HEALTH SYSTEM

2. A HEALTH KNOWLEDGE COMMONS