The NHS finds itself at a digital crossroads. Expectations for technological progress have never been higher. The Government’s 10-Year Health Plan for England places digital transformation at the heart of reform, promising care closer to communities, AI-enabled clinical capacity, and a workforce confident with new tools. The government has committed £102 million to upgrading GP surgeries alone. As the delivery of these ambitions gathers pace, the health service is undergoing significant structural changes. System-wide reorganisation and tighter resources for digital teams risk slowing the transformation that’s most needed.
This context formed the backdrop to the second event in our Futureproofing the NHS webinar series. The discussion brought together Heather Barton-Jones (UiPath), Pritesh Mistry (The King’s Fund) and Fiz Yazdi (Sopra Steria Next) to explore how digital transformation can be sustained under pressure. Their perspectives converged on a single idea that success depends less on technology itself than on how people, culture, and value shape its adoption.
Theme one – supporting workers – upgrading staff experiences with better systems
At the heart of the debate was a simple yet often overlooked reality – for NHS staff, digital transformation will succeed or fail based on whether it makes their working lives easier.
Pritesh Mistry was straight-talking about the problem: “There’s a degree of ‘we can talk about AI, but my computer just keeps crashing.’ That’s sometimes the reality of working in the NHS… Staff who feel invested in and supported then have more opportunities to give that goodwill back into the system,” he said[edited for clarity]. Pritesh pointed to the Darzi Review (2024), which found that many staff viewed NHS technology as more of a hindrance than a help; a story of unreliable systems and patchy support. Overall, he argued that the lived experience of staff is often that the basics don’t work. This creates a clash between the vision for an AI-enabled health service and the reality for people working within the system today.
Heather Barton-Jones identified a striking paradox: public expectations are now outpacing the NHS’s digital capabilities. “The maturity in the civilian population is so vast, it actually risks the industry falling behind because expectations are higher than they’ve ever been,” she observed. In other words, staff and patients increasingly expect tools matching the ease they experience in everyday life.
One frustration looms particularly large – logins. “We hear from clinicians so often that they have 10 to 20 plus logins that they have to handle on a daily basis,” Pritesh noted, “Single sign-on can really help.” he went on, “Ambient voice tools, too, can alleviate some of that cognitive burden” [edited for clarity].
A recent London-wide study found that ambient voice technology reduced time spent on paperwork by 51.7% and allowed each doctor to treat 13.4% more patients during a shift. If applied across all emergency departments in England, this would create capacity to see more than 9,000 additional patients per day. Without dependable infrastructure, however, Pritesh argued that the grander ambitions in the 10-Year Plan risk not being realised. The Plan envisions that “ambient voice technology, or AI scribes, digital triage and the single patient record will end the need for tasks like clinical note taking, letter drafting and manual data entry,” but these ambitions require the basics to work first.
For Fiz Yazdi, standards and platforms do have a role, but only if designed with staff rather than being imposed on them. “We learnt a lot of lessons in government from the Government Digital Service (GDS)’s rollout of standards, about how they can be used as an enabler rather than a constraint. Pick and mix nationally from a backbone, but absolutely implement locally. Ensure teams have a certain level of autonomy. It’s all about the outcome that we want, the experience we want to drive and making things easier to use.” [edited for clarity]. During reorganisation, she argued, national standards can provide reassurance when organisational memory is lost, but implementation should also harness the creativity of local teams.
The message from the panel was clear – workforce digital transformation cannot be about systems alone. Unless the NHS addresses people’s genuine frustrations, builds confidence, allowing real input from staff, new platforms will be met with scepticism or even resistance.
Key takeaways
- Reliability before ambition – staff won’t trust digital plans if core systems remain fragile and their lived experience clashes with the vision. Reducing logins and crashes matters as much as advanced AI.
- Co-create standards – digital standards should be owned both centrally and locally, utilising a ‘freedom within a framework’ approach.
Theme two – digitising systems – automating the tasks that hold frontline workers back
If the first challenge is ensuring staff trust their systems, the second is ensuring that automation and AI are deployed in ways that free time for care rather than creating new burdens. The panellists agreed that digitisation is not simply about efficiency, but about redesigning work so that both staff and patients feel the benefits.
Heather Barton-Jones argued for a fundamental shift in how technology investments are viewed. “For me, particularly with AI and automation and other productivity technologies, it’s not a drain on budget; it’s [the way] we unlock budget. If you’re going to cut budgets to buy a productivity and efficiency solution, it’s a contradiction. When I look at health services all over the world, AI and automation are a lever for productivity. The 10-Year Plan suggests that 60% of staff tasks can be freed with technology, fundamentally reshaping how care is delivered.” [edited for clarity].
Heather pointed to examples where automation has already demonstrated value:
“ Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CHWL)’s nurses were drowning in paper consent forms; we digitised and automated them, and freed 56 clinical hours per day. That’s time back for care. You look at what Cambridge has shown, what’s possible with Ada, their robot: referrals that once took 40 minutes now take five. We have these very tangible and accessible opportunities to show what value looks like.” Looking beyond the UK, Heather pointed to Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE), which has deployed automation, delivering over 800k hours of capacity back into the system, valued at € 30 million.
However, Heather also warned against chasing perfection: “We seem to want to get to the perfect infrastructure, the perfect process. It’ll never be perfect, because the technology is evolving day by day rather than month by month. So it’s a little bit of that agility and confidence to think differently about budget and reinvestment” [edited for clarity].
For Fiz Yazdi, there’s a risk to the quality of care in seeing digitisation only as an efficiency tool: “People really value efficiency, but they don’t get out of bed in the morning for it, and patients are happy when they are wearing devices at home to monitor their health condition, but it’s the tender moments of care that they remember. That’s what transformation should aim for” [edited for clarity]. Fiz gave the example of heart patients trialling home monitoring wearables. While the devices were effective, many people stopped using them when no clinician followed up to check in on them. Without the care provided by humans, technology risks alienating patients rather than engaging them.
Pritesh Mistry stressed that new tools always reshape roles and processes. “It’s not just about putting a technology there and assuming it’s all going to be working fine. It needs potentially different skills… [a] different mix of professions… different processes. All these things change” [Edited for clarity]. Comparing the current adoption of AI to the early internet, Pritesh warned against replicating analogue processes in digital form. He argued that what’s needed is fundamental transformation, not simply doing what we currently do with additional digital technologies bolted on.
Heather offered a sobering statistic from her work across various industries: 92% of AI projects fail to deliver value because they generate insights rather than actionable outcomes.
Together, these perspectives highlight both the promise and the pitfalls of automation. Done well, it can liberate staff to provide meaningful care; poorly done, it risks becoming a blunt, cost-cutting instrument that can alienate staff and patients.
Key takeaways
- Automation as reinvestment – the value of technology should be measured by the clinical capacity it returns, not just the money it saves.
- Never automate a bad process – transformation means redesigning work, not simply making analogue systems electronic.
- Human follow-through matters – patients and staff need the “moments of care” that show technology is working for them.
Theme three – modernising purchasing, unifying services
Procurement has long been treated as an administrative function, but the panel argued that it now sits at the centre of sustaining digital transformation. The 10-Year Health Plan acknowledges that the NHS has “focused too much on lowest cost, rather than best value and outcomes.” How the NHS chooses, funds, and adopts technology, and crucially, how quickly it can do so, will determine whether investment delivers lasting value or ends in disruption. Given the pace of technological change, procurement must enable the NHS to move fast while maintaining safety and quality.
Heather Barton-Jones was clear about the trap to be avoided by buyers: “We need a value-based playbook that sets the rules and avoids the ‘sticker price’ being the defining factor. But the big things to map against buy-in, trust, predictability and cost have to be mandated outcome measures and monitoring, back to the total cost of ownership of what it not just looks like to buy technology or systems or solutions, but what does it look like to run them, what’s the human impact of running that and what’s the knock-on cost rather than perceiving it in a vacuum? And the biggest thing for me, given the pace of change, is time to value. We’ve got to think more intentionally about how we reward that positively.”
Her warning is grounded in the pace of technological change. With AI and automation advancing rapidly, a three-year procurement process risks becoming obsolete before it is even completed. Instead, the NHS should look to adopt and scale proven solutions quickly, drawing on shared standards and blueprints rather than reinventing requirements from scratch.
The conversation also reflected on the potential of shared purchasing power. Panel Chair, Raine Pell pointed out how NHS SBS’s work with Norfolk & Waveney Integrated Care System has already shown what can be achieved – a unified finance and procurement platform that cut requisition-to-order processing from two days to 10 minutes and delivered 94% automatic purchase order generation. Similarly, at Oxford University Hospitals, robotic process automation has reduced the time to onboard junior doctors from 20 minutes to under 7 minutes, resulting in a saving of more than 90 administrative days every year. Such case studies illustrate what happens when procurement is standardised around value and scale.
Key takeaways
- Procurement must focus on outcomes, not sticker price – total cost of ownership and delivery speed matter as much as headline cost.
- Scale proven solutions – shared platforms like Norfolk & Waveney’s demonstrate the gains from collective procurement.
Theme four – supportive solutions – doing corporate services properly
While digital transformation often focuses on clinical services, the panel emphasised that corporate functions such as HR, finance, and procurement are equally crucial in the drive to modernise the health service. With up to £13 billion potentially released through better use of technology to help staff focus on patients, corporate services represent a significant, though often overlooked, portion of this opportunity.
Fiz Yazdi captured both the scale and the risk. “The opportunities in corporate services are enormous. There are many areas where people are crying out for things to be modernised, standardised, and made quicker and more effective. What I particularly value is that scale can also bring equity – ensuring that everyone across the NHS benefits, no matter where they are or which part of the system they work in”[edited for clarity].
Heather Barton-Jones added that in corporate services, the real opportunity lies not in replacing people but in redesigning work so that technology takes on routine tasks and humans focus on what adds value but this requires strong infrastructure: “We’re building technology that operates within clearly defined guardrails and standard operating procedures,” Heather explained “Most importantly, if it sees something it doesn’t recognise, it immediately goes to the human. The only way this works is by sitting alongside frontline staff and understanding their day-to-day reality. Take HR as an example. If automation manages requisitions and ID checks, then staff can spend time with new colleagues, onboarding them properly and helping them succeed. That shift improves retention, accelerates performance, and supports talent acquisition. We need to reframe the message away from ‘a new system is coming for your job’ to one of empowerment. If we approach it step by step, with people at the centre, AI becomes an opportunity to reallocate work in smarter, more human ways” [edited for clarity].
Pritesh Mistry added that corporate services are an underused proving ground: “Corporate services are often overlooked, but they hold huge potential. Because they’re not clinically facing, the risk level is lower, which means you can implement improvements faster and show people the benefits sooner. That builds confidence and helps staff see technology as an enabler rather than a burden. And once people experience the gains, they quickly want more. You get your technology, it helps, and then the new baseline becomes ‘wouldn’t it be even better if it also did A, B and C?’ That appetite for improvement is a powerful driver of digital transformation, creating energy in the system rather than resistance.”[edited for clarity]
Key takeaways
- Corporate services are a safe space for innovation – lower risk, but high impact on staff experience.
- Redesign work, not just systems – technology should automate routine tasks, allowing humans to focus on value.
- Support leaders and staff – without preparation, new systems can create disruption and erode trust.
Conclusion
The discussion revealed both the promise and potential pitfalls of digital transformation in today’s health service. The promise lies in tangible wins, including automation that returns clinical hours, procurement platforms that reduce days to minutes, and corporate services that free staff from paperwork. The pitfalls arise when systems are unreliable, processes are digitised without redesign, or staff are left out of the conversation, leading to distrust, disruption, and wasted investment.
The panellists’ perspectives converged on a shared lesson that technology only delivers when people are brought along. For Heather Barton-Jones, the shift is about redefining value so that investment decisions focus on measurable outcomes and speed-to-benefit. For Pritesh Mistry, the priority is equipping staff with the skills, confidence, and infrastructure to make digital work in practice. For Fiz Yazdi, transformation must be relentlessly people-centred, resisting the temptation to digitise old problems and instead focusing on redesigning services around the needs of staff and patients.
Together, their insights underscore a critical truth that sustaining momentum in digital transformation is not about doing more with less, but about doing differently with what we have. If the NHS can combine reliable infrastructure with value-based procurement, empower staff through supportive corporate systems, and design technology around the people who use it, then digital reform can deliver enormous value amid reorganisation.
The ‘Futureproofing the NHS’ series continues in November with our next session: “Data as infrastructure – the foundation for NHS transformation.” Building on today’s conversation, we will explore how better use of data can underpin everything from workforce planning to patient outcomes.
Roundtable discussion held 19 September 2025
