Content authored by Think Healthcare. Written by Dave Mills, Head of Health and Care, Think Healthcare.
Patient portals have changed how millions of people deal with the NHS. But the next step forward is not a better app. It is making every way a patient can reach NHS services, by app, by web and by phone, work together as one connected front door. Dave Mills, Head of Health and Care at Think Healthcare, on why integration, not more technology, is the real task ahead.
A good idea that grew up in silos
The patient portal was a genuine step forward. For the first time, people could book an appointment, order a repeat prescription or check a result without waiting in a phone queue. Practices saw some of the pressure lift. Patients who were comfortable online got a faster, simpler experience.
The problem was never the portal itself. It was that portals tended to grow up on their own. A practice might have an online consultation tool, a separate patient app, a website and a phone system, each doing useful work, but none of them aware of the others. From the patient’s point of view, the experience could feel disjointed, because it was. And anyone who could not, or would not, use the digital route was left with whatever was left over.
That matters more than it might first appear, because the digital front door is only ever as strong as its least accessible channel. If one route works beautifully and another barely works at all, the patients who depend on the weaker route are the ones who lose out. Those are very often the people who need the most support: older patients, people without reliable internet, and those managing long-term conditions.
The phone never went away
It is easy, in a conversation about digital, to assume that the phone is yesterday’s channel. The evidence says otherwise.
In the most recent GP Patient Survey, carried out by Ipsos for NHS England across more than 700,000 patients, the phone remained by far the most common way people contact their practice.
- 62 percent of patients contact their practice by phone
- 22 percent contact their practice online
- 14 percent contact their practice in person
*Source: GP Patient Survey 2025, Ipsos for NHS England.
In other words, for every patient reaching the NHS through an online portal, almost three are picking up the phone. A digital front door that treats voice as an afterthought is not a front door for most patients. It is a side entrance for the digitally confident, with everyone else queuing at the back.
This is the heart of the matter. The future of patient communication is not about persuading more people onto an app. It is about making sure that however someone chooses to get in touch, by app, by web or by phone, they reach the right place, with the right information, and get the same quality of experience. The channel should be the patient’s choice, not a test they have to pass.
Neighbourhoods raise the stakes
Until recently, most of this thinking stopped at the edge of a single practice. Neighbourhood health changes that.
The ambition behind neighbourhood working is that the organisations serving a local population, practices, community services, pharmacy and more, behave as if they were one. For patients, the promise is simple: you should be able to reach the help you need without having to understand how the NHS is wired together behind the scenes.
That is a communication challenge before it is anything else. And it pulls in two directions at once.
The first is between organisations. Most are not in a position to merge their systems, teams or governance overnight, and they should not have to. The goal is to let multiple organisations coordinate as though they were a single entity, without forcing every partner to abandon the tools they already rely on. The barrier here is rarely the technology. It is the assumption that you need wholesale system change to make a neighbourhood work.
The second is the patient’s front door. Across a neighbourhood, people might contact different sites using different online consultation tools, different portals and different phone systems. If each of those works in isolation, the patient feels the fragmentation, because it is real. A neighbourhood front door has to do two things at once: bring access together across multiple sites and platforms, and stay inclusive enough that the phone-first majority are not left behind.
Put simply, digital should be the connective tissue of neighbourhood health, not the destination.
What integrated actually has to mean
If the future is integration rather than more technology, it is worth being precise about what good integration looks like. Three things matter.
Voice as a full channel, not just triage
A lot of newer platforms have arrived to tackle one very specific problem: the 8am rush, and the triage decision that sits behind it. That is a real problem and worth solving. But a receptionist’s job, and a modern web portal’s range, goes a long way beyond triage.
Unlike the majority of newer AI-only platforms that focus mainly on the 8am rush or triage, our approach goes further. Twenty years of collaboration and integration with the main NHS clinical system suppliers means our voice platform covers the genuine breadth of a receptionist’s role and mirrors the functionality of a modern web portal. That includes booking and managing appointments, ordering repeat prescriptions through EPS, handling administrative requests, fit note requests, self-referrals and more, all by phone, and all flowing back into the practice’s clinical system rather than landing in a separate inbox.
This is the idea behind describing Virtual Care Navigator as the patient portal you can call. It gives the patient who picks up the phone the same self-service experience as the patient who opens an app.
Ready for AI, without leaving anyone behind
Not every organisation is ready for AI, and that is completely reasonable. Our view is that this should never be a barrier to progress. There are AI and non-AI versions of the platform, so teams that are ready can adopt conversational AI now, and teams that are not can start on a proven, rule-based footing with a clear, supported path to upgrade when they choose.
Not being ready for AI yet does not have to mean being left behind. Our ethos is to leave nobody behind, and that is not just about patients. It applies to the staff and the organisations serving them too.
Integration done the safe, NHS-friendly way
If integration is the point, then how that integration is built becomes a safety question, not just a technical one. There is a meaningful difference between a true partner-level integration and a workaround.
Partner-level integrations, built through the system supplier’s official partner programme and connected by a proper API, are more reliable, more secure and far better placed to keep working as systems evolve. The alternative, screen-scraping, where one system imitates a human typing into another, is fragile, harder to assure and can break without warning when the underlying system changes.
For anyone reviewing a patient communication tool, this is one of the most useful questions to ask:
- Is the integration delivered through the clinical system supplier’s official partner programme?
- Is it connected by a supported API, rather than by screen-scraping?
- Is the supplier assured against the relevant NHS clinical safety standards?
The answers tell you a great deal about how safe, reliable and future-proofed a solution really is.
You do not have to rip anything out
One worry that holds organisations back is the fear of disruption. The reassuring news is that completing the digital front door does not mean tearing out what you already have.
A voice platform like this can be overlaid on top of an existing phone system, from any supplier. Organisations that are happy with their current setup can keep it and simply add the self-service and integration layer on top. That lowers the cost, the risk and the upheaval of doing the right thing, and it means the decision to improve patient access does not have to wait for a wider procurement.
A natural moment to take stock
There is also a practical reason this is worth looking at now. This winter marks three years since the launch of the NHS Better Purchasing Framework, the route through which many practices in England bought their current phone systems. For a lot of organisations, that brings contracts up for review at the same time.
A contract review is a good moment to ask a bigger question than simply who provides the phone line. It is a chance to look at the art of the possible: how voice could be woven properly into the digital front door, connected to the online portals patients already use, and made to work as one coordinated experience. The most useful thing an organisation can do is talk to suppliers about what is achievable, and use the moment to plan rather than simply renew.
The point of it all
The future of patient portals is not a single, cleverer app that everyone is funnelled towards. It is a set of channels, app, web and voice, that behave as one, integrated cleanly and safely back into the systems NHS organisations already run, so that patients get a consistent experience whichever way they choose to make contact.
Get that right and the benefits run in every direction. Patients get fair, simple access on their own terms. Staff are freed from repetitive work to spend time with the people who most need them. And neighbourhoods get the connected front door that the whole model depends on.
The technology to do this already exists. The task now is integration, inclusion and the discipline to build it properly.
Think Healthcare has been building voice-based patient access for NHS organisations for more than 20 years, longer than anyone else in the field. If your organisation is reviewing how patients reach your services, or planning for neighbourhood working, we are always happy to talk through what is possible. You can find out more at think-healthcare.co.uk.
*Reference: GP Patient Survey 2025, Ipsos for NHS England. Available at gp-patient.co.uk.
