80% of providers on track for digital social care record by March ’25

The digitising social care programme target of 80% of care providers having a digital social care record in place by March 2025 is on track, Peter Skinner has confirmed.

The director of NHS England Transformation Directorate’s programme announced in a blog post on 21 January 2025 that the target will be met, following the failure to meet the original March 2024 target.

Skinner described the target as “only the beginning”, and outlined plans for the programme, where focus will shift to two key areas: setting new standards for the use of technology in care and joining up health and care services.

The programme team will be working with partners over the next few years to categorise different types of technology and provide guidance on where they can be used and the impact they have.

“Each category of technology will have a list of minimum functionality that must be offered and the standards that apply to the technology. We will then provide a list of solutions that are compliant with these standards,” Skinner said.

He highlighted the need to make the best use of technologies by connecting them to other systems.

“Linking them to social care records and linking social care data with health will make it possible to approach care in a different way, identifying when someone is struggling more at home and intervening early,” Skinner added.

He confirmed that by the end of February 2025, all assured digital social care record systems will have switched on GP Connect, meaning care providers will be able to see a restricted view of the primary care record for the people they care for, in particular changes in medications.

The programme team will be focussing on helping care providers to switch on and use GP Connect in their care records over the coming months so that they are not wasting time trying to contact the GP.

Skinner also announced that an interoperability platform will be developed in 2025 that connects together social care records and provides a single place to connect into NHS systems including patient records, shared care records and the federated data platform.

It will share data that is structured around the minimum operational data standard for direct care purposes so that frontline staff have the latest information about the person they are looking after.

Skinner concluded: “To fully realise these benefits we need to ensure that the whole sector is digitised.

“We want to ensure that every provider has a digital social care record that can be connected to the interoperability platform and that all care providers meet an appropriate level of cyber and data security before information is shared.

“We will be developing options for how to achieve this over the coming months.”

In September 2024, NHS England confirmed that there are no plans to add social care to the Digital Maturity Assessment in 2025, despite calls from the sector for its inclusion.