The Humber Health Partnership (HHP) has outlined a vision for its virtual hospital model as part of its Clinical Services Strategy for 2025 – 2030, aiming to reduce the overall size of its physical estate and take advantage of new technologies to deliver care closer to communities.
“One of the most critical elements to ensuring the success of our clinical strategy will be our work to build the virtual hospital within our group,” the partnership states. “Expanding capacity through our virtual hospital is critical to ensure we can meet the anticipated growth in demand within the resources we have available to us.”
The vision as outlined by HHP is to recreate all of the elements of a hospital in a virtual space, it continues, working alongside physical sites to fully integrate into the existing service offer. Digital inclusion and ease of access will be key features, and existing good practice in areas such as Hospital at Home and the respiratory virtual ward will be expanded.
HHP is to consider the development of virtual care pathways in areas such as urgent and emergency care, inpatient care, and diagnostics. For outpatients, possibilities are being explored for using medical devices and AI-enabled surveillance to detect changes in patient condition, taking away the need for regular check-ups.
A business case and programme plan for the virtual hospital will now be drawn up, according to the partnership, “clearly identifying the scope of change, the priority areas for transformation and the resource required to undertake this work”.
Elsewhere, supplier submissions for a new EPR are being evaluated, with a preferred supplier to be named on 30 November, and contracts to be signed in January 2026. The end of the Frontline Digitisation programme will mean an up-front payment to the successful supplier will be required, HHP highlights, and as such, the full business case for the EPR will proceed iteratively to ensure approvals in time to sign contracts.
Wider trend: Virtual care
NHS England has announced plans for an “online hospital” to go live in 2027, with an aim to deliver up to “8.5 million appointments and assessments in its first three years”. The service, NHS Online, will aim to connect patients virtually to clinicians based anywhere in England, with triage to be completed through the NHS App, and appointments for scans then offered at local community diagnostic centres.The initial focus will be on planned treatment areas with the longest waiting times, with NHS England planning to extend the offering to further areas if clinically safe to do so remotely. Tried-and-tested innovations already in use in the NHS, such as AI and remote monitoring, will be built and scaled in the first instance.
The UK government has shared a prediction that remote monitoring will soon free up half a million appointments per year, offering insights into pilot programmes across the country, including a government-funded trial led by Sheffield Teaching Hospitals and the University of Sheffield to test the benefits of remote monitoring for motor neurone patients. Projects like this will help inform the “wider expansion” of remote monitoring for long-term conditions, as set out by the government’s Elective Reform Plan, it states. “Once in full flow, remote monitoring is expected to free up around 500,000 appointments every year, so patients can be seen by specialists faster.”
Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes ICB has shared impacts from remote technologies including an app to recognise pain in care home residents, a remote monitoring toolkit, and a digital tool using wireless sensors to measure gait and mobility in people at risk of falls. The ICB’s Digitising Social Care programme has seen the introduction of over 1,200 PainChek™ licences across 26 care locations as part of a study set to run to March 2026. The ICB has similarly been testing the use of remote monitoring toolkits to help empower care staff to make data-led healthcare decisions.
