Barts Health NHS Trust has set out plans around innovation, digital skills, and digital infrastructure in its Group Clinical Strategy covering 2025 – 2030+, preparing for reforms set out in the 10 Year Plan for preventing ill health, delivering care closer to home, and digital transformation.
Across the group, 5-year hospital clinical goals include advancing research and new technologies to help deliver innovative treatments, improving outpatient services by offering the latest technologies to help speed up diagnostic rates, and treating more patients with the latest tech to improve outcomes and speed up recovery.
Feedback and engagement with patients through a range of difference avenues has helped shape the strategy, with highlights noting a desire to receive care closer to home, to avoid A&E visits, and to receive more support for long-term conditions. Patients also voiced a desire to see more focus on prevention, taking into account the bigger picture across living conditions, work, and education; and to see more understanding around culture in services such as maternity.
This feedback features in the group’s approach to long-term conditions, where the group shares a focus on utilising tech to identify at-risk patients earlier, to provide targeted care, to expand the use of virtual wards, and to help more people manage their condition at home or in the community. St Bartholomew’s specifies actions to be taken to improve specialist cardiac and cancer care from prevention to treatment, committing to making prevention services easier to access, expanding specialist diagnostics, and providing more care locally. Whipps Cross Hospital is developing a new Women’s Hub to bring services closer to patients, and taking steps to improve discharge and patient flow.
For children, the group prioritises the development of its hospital at home model, allowing children and young people to stay at home with their families where possible whilst receiving care. A “network of care” to connect the different sites is planned to make accessing timely care for children easier, and work is to be done with community partners to create family health hubs, offering more support for families during “key moments”.
Earlier this year, the trust highlighted the impact of the use of a virtual platform for its children’s cancer ward, reportedly enabling children deemed well enough to be monitored from home. Patients are monitored using equipment which records their observations every four hours, with data “continuously monitored by the clinical nurse specialist team who stay in touch with the parents and can escalate concerns when necessary”. Last year, around 44 percent of patients presenting with a fever were managed through the virtual ward.
To promote the delivery of innovation across life sciences, research, digital, and commercial, the group expresses plans to develop new technologies to improve services, to build partnerships with industry and academia, and to expand its research capabilities. This can be seen in the recently introduced Barts Health Data Platform (BHDP), hosted in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, which is designed to offer a dedicated workspace for research projects and the opportunity to integrate AI in the identification of trends or patterns amongst large patient cohorts. It brings together information types across scans, health records and lab results, granting the potential to explore health conditions and treatments in greater depth.
This focus on research and innovation is reflected across the group’s ambitions, with St Bartholomew’s set to increase research and clinical trials, expanding services for innovative treatments such as advanced cellular therapeutic treatments, and exploring the use of new technologies. At The Royal London & Mile End Hospitals, the future vision includes performing more surgeries using innovations such as minimally invasive robotics, and supporting new life sciences developments to speed up the adoption of new treatments and technologies for patients. For Whipps Cross Hospital, hopes are to pursue research and training to improve care for older people in North East London.
The group also commits to creating an environment where teams and hospitals can thrive, looking to incorporate the use of AI and digital learning to provide staff with “modern training” and to help them succeed in “the hospitals of the future”. It mentions hiring new permanent staff to help build a strong and stable team, supporting wellbeing, creating new roles, and developing a fair and respectful workplace.
Other actions to be taken to enhance the group’s readiness for the future include developing a strong and interconnected digital infrastructure, and ensuring all technology is up-to-date and connected with other healthcare providers or services to improve care.
To read the “With you for every moment” Group Clinical Strategy for 2025 – 2030+, please click here.
Digital plans and strategies from across the NHS
The latest instalment of HTN’s ICS regions series looks to the South West, exploring some of the latest developments, insights, plans, and strategies for digital and data.
London Ambulance Service NHS Trust board shared a series of updates on current digital, data and innovation work, including an AI and automation programme, infrastructure programme, and data programme. The board share key areas of focus for its digital & data programme 2025/26, such as the implementation of robotic process automation to reduce repetitive tasks and free up administrative time, and an infrastructure programme aiming to reduce internal critical incidents by 30 percent by April 2026.
King’s Health Partners, a partnership between Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley, and King’s College London, has published a strategy to 2030 built around the three strategic priorities of delivering personalised health, improving population health, and accelerating digital health.
NHS Dumfries & Galloway’s board shared its Annual Delivery Plan 2025/26, outlining planned actions in areas including digital and innovation, along with updates on digital transformation from across the system. Leading into upcoming digital programmes and priorities, the board shares that it is looking to appoint a new director of digital, helping with executive support and commitment to optimising technologies and upskilling the workforce in digital skills.
