The newly formed West and North London ICB ten year clinically led strategy has proposed an additional £360 million recurrent investment in proactive, community-based care and mental health by 2028/29, adding to a £12 billion annual spend for the 4.5 million residents across the region.
Feedback from engagement with communities and staff revealed challenges around access, inconsistencies with information, fragmented care, and a lack of coordination between services, WNL states. This indicates a need to rebalance investment toward prevention, early intervention, and community-based support.
Ten principles underpin the strategy, including the £360 million to be invested in proactive, preventative, community-based care, improving outcomes, reducing avoidable demand, putting the system on “sustainable financial footing” by 2035/36, and investing in “what works”, based on evidence as a learning health system. Digital, data, and AI will be “the engine of transformation”, it continues, starting with AI-enabled triage and navigation capability and integrated urgent care, supported by the London Secure Data Environment and built on open standards.
By addressing need and demand earlier and in the right setting, WNL plans to reduce avoidable acute demand, relying on integrated neighbourhood teams, population health management, digital-first access, the NHS App, and improved self-management support.
Two care model shifts are required to succeed in its ambitions, according to the ICB, with neighbourhood health as the “core unit of delivery”, and planned care redesigned through community-first and digital pathways. For neighbourhood health, the next two years will focus on standing-up teams in every neighbourhood, performing risk stratification to identify the highest-need groups, and delivering integrated, proactive care with support from digital tools. Years three to five will then build on neighbourhoods as the core unit of delivery, with a single point of access, shared care records, and “anticipatory care as the default for residents with complex needs”. By year ten, the hope is to have established a fully integrated neighbourhood offer across health, social care, and VCSE.
In planned care transformation, aims are to “fix the front door” in years one and two, co-designing community-first pathways in high volume specialties like MSK, and using self-referral, digital triage, and advice and guidance as the default. Years three to five will then move on to redesign planned care around AI and remote pathways, featuring AI-supported triage, remote monitoring, and specialist opinions delivered in neighbourhoods. By 2036, the ICB intends to have created a “radically different” model, with digital-first as the default approach, and “activated patients managing routine care with remote support”.
For digital, data, and AI specifically, by year five WNL wants to have established real-time analytics and population health capabilities, with genomic medicine embedded in clinical decision-making to help reduce diagnostic delays, and AI-based care for up to 30 percent of healthcare contacts. At year ten, precision prevention will be enabled at population scale, it goes on, supported by the linked longitudinal dataset.
Workforce is a key strategic enabler of these future care model shifts, WNL highlights, putting forward an emerging workforce proposition for a “mixed, community-anchored, and digitally augmented workforce” capable of supporting residents in self-management and enabling earlier support. AI, automation, and robotic or digital coaches will also reportedly augment staff capacity, releasing time and standardising low-risk, repeatable work.
Wider trend: Digital transformation in London
University College London Hospitals has shared a series of digital transformation plans and priorities in its five-year strategy to 2031, with plans to redesign care pathways with remote monitoring, digital tools to support care being delivered outside of hospitals, and to focus on information sharing via joined-up digital systems. UCLH highlights its work with a national initiative to integrate the Epic EHR with the NHS electronic prescription service, with an aim to create a model that other trusts will be able to replicate. Under the initiative, outpatient and some discharge prescriptions will be sent to community pharmacies to enable them to be collected locally.
London Ambulance Service NHS Trust has reported on progress including work on implementing a new digital and data operating model and its plans for a 12 month automation programme focusing on low-level processes. Key leadership roles are now in place, the trust notes, ahead of a transition to the operating model designed to improve alignment between digital and operational teams and offer greater flexibility for changing organisational priorities. User acceptance testing has been completed for its electronic controlled drug record programme and the trust notes early results from ambient voice technology use, showing improvements in productivity and documentation quality, along with reduced admin burden for clinicians.
For HTN’s trust region series, we took a deep dive into what’s happening with digital and data across the London region, exploring digital strategies, plans, and priorities, pilots, innovations, case studies, and insights from the sector.
