Single patient record will not be ‘huge data lake’ says Ming Tang

Ming Tang, interim chief digital and information officer at NHS England, said that the single patient record (SPR) will connect existing systems, rather than create a new one.

Speaking at Digital Health’s 10 year plan webinar on 7 November 2025, Tang said that the SPR would be “a set of Lego bricks” connecting existing systems such as electronic patient records and shared care records so that “clinicians and patients can view a trusted, longitudinal record”.

She called the SPR “a once in a generation opportunity to connect the NHS and make it truly patient-centred”, but stressed that cultural change, clinical safety and public trust will be key to its success.

“What we’re really trying to do is federate.

“It’s not a massive new platform or a huge data lake. We want to surface the right data for the right use case, in the right context,” Tang explained.

Lee Rickles, chief information officer at Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust and director of the Yorkshire and Humber Care Record, welcomed the vision, but warned that many shared care records remain “technically fragmented and financially unsustainable”.

“There’s some brilliant work across the community, but we haven’t cracked sustainability,” he said.

“Suppliers need to step up to open standards, and we need to be more ambitious. Sending PDFs between systems isn’t good enough — that’s failure.”

From a local government perspective, Ian Anderson, director of legal services and partnerships at Hull City Council, argued that integration must extend beyond the NHS to include social care and voluntary organisations.

“It’s not just about a patient presenting at A&E. We need to understand the data held in local authority and voluntary systems.

“The SPR can only work if we see it as part of a whole-system approach,” he said.

Basil Bekdash, clinical safety officer at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, said that unresolved issues around liability and data ownership could undermine the programme.

“We haven’t yet agreed what happens when things go wrong.

“Who’s responsible if harm occurs through access to shared data? Without clear governance, we risk organisations pointing fingers rather than learning,” he said.

Emma Jackson, chief allied health professional and nursing information officer at Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust, shared an example of how fragmented information affects frontline care.

She described spending four days trying to identify the right mental health team for a patient in crisis — a situation that could have been avoided with integrated access to their medical records.

Tang confirmed that NHS England is negotiating with telecom providers to ensure that the NHS App usage remains free from mobile data charges and that future updates will include multilingual support.

She also acknowledged ongoing work to simplify proxy access and ensure that patients retain control over who can view their data.

The SPR will be introduced gradually, starting with maternity, frailty and end-of-life care, and will be enabled by a new legal framework to underpin data sharing and enforce interoperability standards, Tang said.

She added that around half of the investment will go toward change management rather than technology — a deliberate shift aimed at avoiding past mistakes.

Panellists agreed that collaboration, not centralisation, will determine the programme’s success.

Rickles said: “Let’s keep the focus on the patient and on changing how we work, not just the systems we use.”