Digital tools key to improve patient flow in the NHS, report says
- 6 May 2026
- A report from Public Policy Projects says NHS patient flow issues stem from governance and fragmented pathways, not just hospital bed capacity
- It calls for a shift to “actionable intelligence” using real-time data across care settings
- It also warns digital tools alone are insufficient, highlighting the need for interoperability, workforce training and system-wide redesign
Digital technology should be used to support whole-system patient flow rather than simply improving bed management, according to a new report from Public Policy Projects (PPP).
The report, ‘Beyond bed management: enabling whole-system patient flow through digital intelligence’, argues that persistent flow problems across the NHS are rooted as much in governance and fragmented pathways as in operational pressures within hospitals.
It says digital tools have potential to improve the movement of patients across acute, community and neighbourhood care settings. However, participants warned that technology alone will not resolve longstanding bottlenecks.
Instead, it calls for a shift from viewing patient flow as solely a bed management issue.
The report draws on a roundtable held on 18 March 2026, chaired by Dr Victoria Betton, director for digital, data and AI at Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex.
Dr Betton said: “It was my privilege to chair this roundtable discussion, convening experts from the NHS, industry and academia all with well-informed and nuanced understandings of how digital intelligence can help operationalise the 10 year health plan for England’s three major shifts.
“What emerged was a rich and thoughtful dialogue that went far beyond the technicalities of digital tools, touching on governance, human-centred design, and the very culture of healthcare delivery.
“One of the most compelling sentiments shared by participants is that patient flow is fundamentally a governance challenge. Technology alone cannot solve systemic issues.
“It must be embedded within redesigned workflows and governance structures that clarify accountability and enable teams to apply actionable intelligence. Without this alignment, even the most advanced digital tools risk becoming underutilised or misapplied.”
Roundtable attendees said NHS organisations need digital tools that provide real-time insight into demand, capacity and risk, rather than retrospective reporting, but this intelligence must be matched with clear decision-making authority for local teams if it is to have operational value.
Interoperability is described in the report as a “must, not a nice-to-have”. While national standards are already in place, participants said inconsistent adoption continues to prevent systems from sharing data effectively.
The report recommends that commissioners and procurement teams include explicit, testable interoperability requirements in tenders for electronic patient records and other digital systems, backed by open APIs and contractual penalties where suppliers fail to deliver.
It also highlights the need for greater investment in digital transformation in community settings, particularly tools that support cohort segmentation, risk stratification and preventative care.
The report concludes that digital transformation must be accompanied by strong change management, workforce training and user-centred design.
Without that, it warns, the NHS risks digitising existing inefficiencies rather than redesigning care around the needs of patients and staff.
One case study in the report describes how Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust used Alcidion’s Miya Precision platform to improve visibility of bed capacity and discharge activity across community hospitals.
The average patient length of hospital stays reduced by around five days during the first phase of the programme.
1 Comments
“If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, 1922)
To speakers of NHS-ese, who use the phrase “the flow of patients”, “patients” are perceived as an amorphous commodity, shaped only by the vessels the NHS constructs in order to contain and control it, and their own “digital intelligence” is what controls the flow of this commodity around the NHS. Their perception of this stuff, which flows at their command, could not be further from seeing it as a large number of individualised, far from formless, and decidedy autonomous agents, who control their own direction. Speakers of NHS-ese perceive their role as being that of totally control this stuff, using their “digital intelligence” – some kind of engineering problem. Could anything be further from actual human intelligence and could anything be further from the reality perceived by those those who are not speakers of NHS-ese?
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