From home tests to AI care plans: why the NHS App could be the launchpad for healthcare’s next big leap.
The launch of Freeserve in 1998 was a founding moment for Europe. People queued outside electronics shops to collect the free CD that gave them home internet access, made possible only after the UK opened up its telecoms network to the private sector. That regulatory shift created the conditions for an explosion of new online services and business models, which spread across Europe and transformed consumer life.
We may be witnessing a similar founding moment with the NHS App in England. Like Freeserve in the late 1990s, the NHS App has become an open gateway to a critical national infrastructure — this time, healthcare. England’s market is large enough to matter, larger than most in Europe, yet far more orderly than the USA’s. The NHS login provides identity verification that patients can complete from anywhere, and the App’s terms of service offer strong safeguards against exploitation. Crucially, it is open to new entrants in a way no other healthcare market in Europe currently is, potentially setting the stage for a wave of health innovation comparable to the internet boom that followed Freeserve.
From the beginning, the NHS App team focused on a narrow set of features: GPs’ record access, appointment booking and prescription renewal. For everything else it signalled a desire for a market. This is unusual — Scotland and Northern Ireland have no such market or desire. NHS Wales followed England’s footsteps by using the original source code of the NHS App. Denmark, Estonia, France, Hungary Italy, Spain, Sweden and Turkey each contracted with one software developer and locked out everyone else. This was a pattern which we saw in our book “Personal Health Records for Governments”. This was the pattern of national telecom monopolies of old.
England began the process with digital suppliers for GP buyers. Econsult and other online triage systems allowed GPs, and then ICS regions, to choose between different approaches to assessing a patient. AccuRx and others handled online consultations between patient and GP surgeries. Both Econsult and AccuRx received venture capital funding.
Expanding the market to hospitals increased the available budgets. Zesty and others allow appointment booking, handling the complexity and heterogeneity across different hospital departments. More venture capital funding flowed.
For us at Patients Know Best (PKB), it is a privilege to work with the newest generation of innovators. We show the patient their medical records in the NHS App. Our APIs allow anyone serving a patient to add to the medical record, which we show in the NHS App. And the innovators are expanding and redefining what is useful in the medical record.
PocDoc does cholesterol checks at home. Testcard does urine infection tests at home. MyHealthChecked does other blood tests at home and recently expanded to genetic tests. Holly Health teaches and tracks health habits. MyRenalCare provides automated kidney dialysis advice. All the data flowing in is medically coded so that today’s doctors’ medical record systems can consume it, and tomorrow’s AI systems can do things I cannot even imagine today. Crucially in this model, it’s the patient who has ownership of their PKB record, deciding who they share their data with and when.
The next generation of innovators is building on the NHS record of the patient, combining it with data from the patient’s phone to give automated care plans. Your smartphone is the best behaviour change tool in humanity’s history. Wouldn’t it be good if it supported good changes?
Other European governments have not yet picked this up from the UK. But they always do and they will. And we already see emerging markets seeing these benefits. That widens the market for investors, and hastens the innovation for consumers. It won’t happen as fast as the Freeserve revolution — this is healthcare after all — but it won’t be as slow as before. Sensors plus AI plus a market means a new era.
This is why the audience IBIS Capital is pulling together at HealthTechX is so important and so timely. 2026 will be a great year for patients and it will be because of the innovators who attend HealthTechX 2025.
At HealthTechX Summit on 5 November, we’ll explore how Consumer Health is becoming a reality in the NHS and beyond, why AI in healthcare is poised for its next leap, and how wearables and other connected devices are joining the dots in Value-Based Healthcare. We’ll also look at the opportunities and challenges of consumerisation in health — and what it means for access, innovation, and the shape of a two-tier system.
These are just some of the issues we’ll be tackling across a packed agenda. Join us at the prestigious Hurlingham Club in London on 5 November — and meet the people defining healthcare’s next era.
👉 Book here — 50% off tickets until 14 Sept with code HTX25SUMMER50
